


(i'll see you on) the other side

by elanor_pam



Series: The Golden Age [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (or troll trafficking?), Adopted Children, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Consensual Mind Control, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Harassment, Human Trafficking, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Non-Explicit, Original Character Death(s), Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Public Masturbation, Rape Recovery, Recovery, Slavery, Telepathic Bond, space gardening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-03-04 01:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 69,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13353879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanor_pam/pseuds/elanor_pam
Summary: Eudora Kalhil only wanted to resume a harmless childhood hobby. Instead, he gets a highly privileged view of the dark underbelly of the Alternian Empire... and this being theAlternian Empire, it's dark and slimy indeed.It kinda harshes his chill. He elects to do something about it. The chain of events cascading from this decision sparks the beginning of the end for the Empire as it was always known.





	1. Chapter 1

You are Eudora "The Wrathtor" Kalhil, a purpleblooded frigate captain, and in your defense your title had amused you back when you filled in your Adult Title form. 

You're still okay with it. You're okay with a lot of things. You are in fact currently the chillest troll in the armada, so chill that if someone walked up and told you "wow dude you're super chill" you'd probably say "huh" and wonder why that's even such a big deal. Possibly because it makes you safer to be around. That sounds reasonable. Lots of things are revealed to be reasonable after some small amount of thought, and you are unbeknownst one of the most reasonable of them.

You have never once in your life had an episode of berserker violence, because that just isn't you. What _is_ you is sometimes a topic of debate in the confines of your eminently reasonable mind; the conclusion is generally "boring, but satisfied with yourself". From the top of your intimidatingly solid highblood height you look down placidly upon those who attempt to rile you up and are thankful for the fact that you can afford to be as bland as stale porridge. Otherwise you'd have to humor these uptight assholes, and that would be an annoying waste of your time.

As a result of your general mildness and thoughtfulness, as well as a talent for delegating the right tasks to the right people, you find yourself the victorious party in a great many altercations; avoid the fallout of several ugly and unfortunate political meltdowns; make a surprising amount of well-placed acquaintances; and are finally rewarded for outstanding service with an admiralty and a much bigger frigate. Which is probably called something other than a frigate, but truth is you never wanted to be a ship captain or anything so you don't much care. It floats in space and that's that.

But when your yellowblooded secretancillary Pascal presents you the plans for your new and far more luxurious ship, you suddenly think— I have more space. I have more money. I have more time. 

Therefore you decide to resume your wigglerhood passion for gardening, a move which would turn out to have immense, far-reaching, staggering consequences for your people and several different civilizations. 

In a circuitous, roundabout sort of way.

#

First order of business is joining the Horticutterist's Society; in response to your application, they send in a very snooty-looking blueblooded evaluator, nearly as tall and even more rectangular than you are. 

She steps out of the transportalizer already preemptively twisting her nose.

"Welcome," you say, then wonder if that's too short a greeting. Being too effusive sounds so fake, but you're trying to impress, you're even wearing the armor with the spherical shoulderpads and the little purple half-cape that drapes over your arm in a carefully cultivated douchey way. You psychically prod Pascal's mind for an opinion, but he's even blander than you are and shares your opinion on the matter of fakey expressions of non-existent friendliness, as well as the doucheyness of your cape, which he incidentally helped you pick out for that very reason and in the expectation that the evaluator would appreciate a shared quality.

You're also wearing some nasty greasy paste around your eyes, your sole concession to the Messiahs' faith. The expectations laid on your caste are myriad and confusing and sometimes contradictory, but meeting them halfway tends to grease the gears of social relations, so to say.

You relay your mental pun to Pascal, who returns solemn approval, and by then it's been over a second and appending pleasantries would be awkward anyway.

"Greetings," the blueblood says, dryly, and to your relief jumps headfirst into the topic. "Tell me about your garden."

"It's shabby," you admit right away. She'll be seeing it in person soon enough regardless. "I sent in my application in hopes of rectifying this sad state of affairs somehow."

She nods. "Lead the way," she says, simply; and you lead her, easily.

At the greenhive's entrance you find yourself facing another second-long conundrum. It's running the daylight cycle right now, and the lights are bearable — you don't have any native Alternian plants yet, they are prohibitively expensive outside the homeworld — but still uncomfortable and overwarm in general. Usually Pascal just floats a tarpaulin over both your heads when you need to go in at day-cycle time, but his psi is... kind of a secret. In the end you grab one of the wider sunstoppers from the cylindrical container by the door and shield both of your heads. Pascal gets a sunstopper of his own, as well as a mental apology for having to keep a hand busy with something that isn't his ubiquitous PDA.

The inside is exactly as uncomfortable with your armor on as you expected it to be. You pull out your analogic wind-flapping device, a delicately decorated paper affair, and aim it at both yourself and her as a matter of courtesy. 

"It's still seven hours until the night-cycle kicks in," you inform her. "The lights do have an emergency cutoff switch, but my bitumias are very fragile, and if possible I'd rather spare them such a dramatic climatic upheaval."

"You don't have close-quarters light-projection apparatuses?" she asks, in a tone that was somehow, simultaneously, dismissive and disapproving.

"Only for my rhododendron," you answer, scrupulously truthful as you've so far learned makes shit easier on you. "It's hardy enough to thrive under an improvised illumination rig. I began this indoor project with more enthusiasm than planning, as you can see, and was caught unprepared by the price inflation on fleet-side gardening supplies."

"What were you expecting?" she asks. Something about her neutral tone makes you choose to assume it's not a rhetorical question.

"To resume from where my wigglerhood lawnring was left off," you admit. "It was embarrassingly naive of me, I know."

She comments no further on the topic, apparently fascinated by the rectangular container of bitumias and the sad, watery bitumen they excreted on their gutter. It's immature, you want to say, too diluted to be of any use— but as a certified evaluator of the Horticutters she can probably tell more about its state at a glance than you ever could. 

There's no point in trying to justify your garden's shortcomings any further. You've already twice mentioned the issue of funds and how it relates to your certificate request, and as a horticutter she should be well aware of all the sweet discounts and exemptions her certificate nets her. So you simply wait.

After enough staring to determine which kind of lusus the manure for their compost came out of (you and Pascal got bored and started exchanging theories about what might be so interesting about that particular flowerbed), she straightens her back and finally looks around at the garden block with something akin to genuine interest. 

It's not much to look at, but you're definitely proud of what you achieved with your budget. You cut the soil containers yourself, to measure, and arranged them for ease of circulating and watering. Most of your plants so far are on the small side— herbs and bushes and young trees in general— but eventually, once your Ypeh hits its third flowering and you purchase that cherry tree you still only dare to dream about and find the right kind of soil for that bargatarian knotbark seed...

Once you get all the money and supplies and give it a few sweeps, you'll have several arrangements similar to the one around your rhododendron, which your visitor is making a beeline for, leaving you and your sunblocker behind. 

You catch up in a hurry and cover the envoy again, feeling a little embarrassed. (Pascal stings the back of your hand, but when you check into his head he only wants to send in a side-view memory of your blundering run. Amusing but irrelevant.) She doesn't seem to care even as much as you do; she just looks at your rhododendron's barely-open maw with, for once, approval. 

"I see it's very well-fed," she says. "How do you manage its diet?"

You scritch under one of the rhododendron's leaves. It twitches sleepily away from your touch. "Good girl," you tell the plant, kind of out of habit, before answering the envoy's question. "Normally I alternate between frozen flesh meals in clearance — jade-standard and up are usually still in edible condition when they get price cuts — and ship pests. By the time I run out of one there's always enough of the other." You shrug your caped shoulder. "The sazonal pest hunt has become a favored downtime event for the crew." 

"You said 'normally'," the envoy points out. 

"Recently my crew suffered many losses during a routine subjugation gone sour," you say. You fiddle with the rhododendron's fuzzy crown. 

"Subjugglation?" the envoy half-asks, half-corrects. 

"Nah, _aliens_ ," you mumble. Suddenly you don't much want to dwell on the topic. "Anyway, I don't like to expose their bodies in alien soil, mixed in with alien— guts and stuff. So I bring them in when I can."

"What about her?" the envoy asks, indicating Fakiya's prone form with a dismissive hand gesture. Fakiya waves upward in response, her hand full of nasty greasy dolorito dust. 

"Oh, her," you say, a bit surprised. She's been lying here under the rhododendron's shadow long enough that you stopped registering her presence as unusual. "That's Fakiya, a cavalreaper sergeant. I brought her in with the other corpses, but she cried out when I lifted her, so I laid her back down...?" You wave a demonstrating hand over the sergeant's body, a little helplessly. "She's kind of taken over my garden chair ever since."

The envoy raised an eyebrow. "How did you mistake her for a corpse?"

Fair question. You shrug. "Her guts were hanging out."

The envoy raised her other brow to the previous one's height. "And you didn't throw her in anyway?"

"Well, no!" You rear back a little, scandalized. "That would have been really shitty, all the more when she said not to. And my other trolls were watching. It would have been terrible for crew morale if I fed her someone alive."

"Totally," Fakiya agrees, then turns to you. "This the plant judgey thing person?"

"Yes, therefore I'd appreciate it if you were polite," you answer, carefully lifting the hem of her shirt. Fakiya wordlessly offers her pack of doloritos, which the evaluator dismisses with a small shake of her head. Should she even be eating that garbage? Who even gave her that. (You ask Pascal, but his list of likely suspects is nearly the same as yours, and both are too long. You drop it and focus back on the evaluator; Pascal will probably have it sorted out by the time you leave the block anyway.)

(Frankly there _is_ such a thing as an excess of competence and you well know which of you most tragically suffer from it.)

"Why did you leave her in the rhododendron's range, if you don't want her eaten?" the evaluator asks, eyeing the plant with some suspicion.

"Be easier to clean up if I died," Fakiya answers before you can, spraying the evaluator's very official-looking indigo-blue robe with dolorito flakes. "Oops, sorry," she brushes the more stubborn flakes off, "but yeah, I was like, might as well just hang out here, not spread any miasma I might of get, and if I went the big girl coulda just lean down and yoink me out of everyone's hair, kinda thing. I just wanted a shot at my last battle, yanno, didn't really think I'd win but here I am, funny thing."

You finish tugging the fabric off the wound. The crust around it is certainly much more brown than that nasty orange-yellow from the previous week, and the new batch of suppuration-sucking maggots is still looking pretty skinny after an entire night and part of a day. The intumescence under and around the wound has also all but vanished, reduced to a barely noticeable swelling. And it still smells like yesternight's ablution-trap-made fermented rice wash, rather than nasty putrescence. 

You were totally right to wash that coil of intestine before putting it back in. And speaking of washing—

"You ought to put on a clean shirt now," you say. "If you caught something at this point it would be very dumb of us both."

" _Nooooo_ ," Fakiya slurs, slapping the air around you with a wobbly hand. "This is a _battle_ , I ain't gonna change in the battlefield, that's for _weenies_."

"Whoops," you say, in lieu of an answer, and rip that particular chunk of shirt right out. "Clothing damage has happened." ( _Aff_ , she says, rolling her eyes at the envoy.) "This calls for a field dressing. No sense in exposing a wound to the enemy."

Pascal steps forward with a wound-dressing kit. That's the standard one, you note. Yes, but outsider witness, you get. Nobody sticks to standard, you point out. Hard-line Inspectorturers, you receive, never know. You nonverbal acquiesce, but later? Redo later, mental shrug. Could try distracting her now. In that case.

"I apologize for the sergeant," you tell the envoy. "It seems she spent her wigglerhood at the desert border with a subpar water connection, and doesn't do baths as such. My ship is not lacking in water, but her habits remain entrenched."

"The desert border..." the envoy mumbles in vague wonder. "That _would_ explain how she's doing so well in this hot room under so many lights."

"Haha, no," Fakiya laughs and waves a hand at the envoy, immediately spoiling your attempt at distraction right when Pascal was in the middle of dabbing her wound with diluted bootleg booze, its effects clearly visible on the shrinking maggots. "When the sun came up you fecking bet I was long huddled in my coon cursing the shit out it. I dunno, is just nice here, not at all like home. It was weird at first but the lights aten't bad, kept my chills at bay and such, even."

"She's very much a weirdo," you say lightly, hoping the envoy will take the cue and forget Fakiya already. Why do snoots never dismiss lowbloods when it's convenient? You wonder Pascal-ways. They do, but their convenience is not ours, Pascal answers, and you stand silent witness to the half-a-second of bitterness he allows himself before moving on. (You don't feel qualified to offer comfort on the matter.)

But the envoy merely nods. "I hope your recovery goes on without issue," she says, to your surprise, before walking away. (At your back, Fakiya says "Fanks!" amid the renewed sound of crunching.)

The rest of the visit is thankfully without issue. You show her the lighting rigs, explain how you made use of an overheating piece of machinery while saving up for an appropriate environmental warmer, expounded on the automated day-night cycles, detailed your future plans for purchase and disposition of plants. At some point, it stopped being about impressing the envoy and became pure nerding out to a neutral, albeit receptive audience. You're having so much fun blathering on, you constantly have to stop yourself from asking if she's bored— this is literally her business, what could be wrong about a horticutter loving horticutterism?

When you circle back to the door and Pascal catches up, you're in that awkward stage where you've run out of things to say, but not of enthusiasm, and embarrassment is starting to set in. He lets you retrench by decaptchaloguing two water bottles and offering one to each, and psi-pinches the back of your hand to suggest some segues. 

"Um, looks like I extended myself for quite a bit," you say, not quite as smoothly as it sounded in Pascal's head. There was more, but you seem to have gotten stuck, so you cough a little and chug nearly half the bottle down instead. 

"It was enjoyable," she says, a little less frigidly than before. She even sips from the proffered water, which seems to you a much greater sign of her positive opinion. "I'm pleased to note your passion on the subject is genuine, and I'll be sure to pass on my findings to the Cadre of Horticutter Masters."

"Really!? That's... that's good, I'm glad," you blurt out, half-reading from Pascal's unimpressed mental suggestions. He even opens the door to you both; thank fuck _someone_ is on the ball here. "When can I expect news of their decision?"

"That I cannot say," she says, suddenly back to her coldly neutral tone. "The Masters have busy schedules. They might not get to discuss your case for a while yet."

"I see," you say. It made sense; nearly all the Master Horticutters were hobbyists like you, or had political duties to attend along with gardening. Even the ones who made horticutterism their livelihood were cultivar administraitors rather than gardeners, overseeing planet-sized plantations to feed the empire with, and were lucky to have the time to tend to a single flower pot with their own hands. 

While you were lost in thought, you end up making it back to the transportalizer. 

"If their decision is negative," you ask, "will I be able to apply again in time?"

"Yes," is all she says, before stepping on the platform and blinking away. 

#

You receive your permit less than a week later, a couple of days before Fakiya just sort of wanders out of the greenhive, darkened a vague brownish in her entire front and violently freckled, asking if anybody had a spare lance. 

Your new credentials net you all the discounts you'd been hoping for, and more besides. You buy appropriate lights, finish the insulation, finally get rid of the malfunctioning machine now that you can afford real heating. You buy a selection of fruit-bearing plants and tea herbs for the delight of Sub-lieutenant Engisnër and her not-so-secret club of leaf-juice snots. Weirdly enough you have trouble finding pots and vegetacoons up to your specifications, so those you continue to build on your own, albeit with originals to dismantle and compare with; once invited to the Horticutter's specialists' forum, you open up a thread devoted to your ongoing project and obtain some amount of traffic, as well as unhelpful suggestions. 

To a momentary flash of not-quite-surprise, you find your Evaluator is quite active in the forums. She goes by Marshall Holofarn Visegrip, a moniker which has got yours beat by a cosmic mile, and online at least she adopts the usual cringing blueblood subservience toward those of your caste. Admittedly, she does not seem adverse to disagreeing with highbloods, even if she prefaces it with all sorts of qualifiers, and she's aloof but not aggressive towards the rare olive-down member, which does quite raise her in your estimate. In fact, reading past tone she always has something helpful to say, and seems to be very highly regarded in the greenery circles. 

Pascal confirms your impression. _From below she reads as approachable_ , he thinks at you. _Also careful. Wording implies public opinion might not match private. See this post. In passive voice drops casteist propaganda, in first person contradicts it. From above it's backhanded insult. From below it's discrete acknowledgement. Everyone is happy._

Politically canny, you wonder, impressed. Exactly what you are not. How do you come across to these people?

Pascal's response is dripping with amusement: _a cypher. Still water, with shapes deep within. Fear makes them look monstrous, but unstirred it's safer to navigate than your fellow purplebloods. They'll take it, all the while wondering what horrors lie within._

You laugh out loud, surprise even yourself. It's like a prank! Your favorite kind, where things aren't nearly as bad as they look like. Their imaginary relief brings you a great deal of private cheer. Oh, if only you could afford to show the universe. There's nothing in there, just shallow water, and the nightmares are but reflections. Alas!

Pascal huffs through a smile, answers with nothing but vague impressions— fond ruefulness, rueful fondness— as he retreats back to that safe place in his mind you'd never dare invade. 

#

Through the following seasons you make a name for yourself in the forum among the do-it-yourself crowd, and strike a sort of friendship with Marshall Visegrip. Your greenhive thrives; your bitumias produce their first batch of truly high-grade bitumen, your rhododendron nearly doubles in size, its shade becomes a weirdly popular (and effective) location for wound recovery, and Engisnër's club starts bringing your ship some extra money by selling locally produced blends under Pascal's management.  

Before you notice it, several uneventful sweeps have gone by. You find the time and the materials to experiment with soil mixes to simulate specific growing conditions, and your results generate discussion and acclaim on the community. Your kismesis dies in battle, which bums you right out for a while, but somehow within a few seasons you find yourself shacked up with Fakiya of all people, who surprisingly accepts your usual lack of sexy moods and still won't take proper baths; you get to fill buckets when you're expected to and just banter the rest of the time, an arrangement you did not expect to find again any time soon. A chill kismesissitude, which is exactly as you'd both have it. 

(Pascal apparently is part of an online community of finicky people who find pailing as grody as he does, and who'll shack up for one-pail-stands only when they absolutely must and try to forget about it the rest of the time. You're pretty lucky you're capable of twiddling bulges without hating yourself.)

Your actual job is also going very well, thank you, and on a good day you can even be arsed to remember your rank without Pascal's help. You keep coming across forum pals on your dealings, too, which frankly makes your career go a lot smoother, but mostly it means you have more time for your compost mixes. 

Eventually you start making plans to expand your garden and finally import native alternian flora. 

\-- clenchedFist [CF] is trolling chillaxRex [CR] \--

CF: -> Legitimate alternian soil does not come in cheap, Highblood. Even for us.   
CF: -> Her Imperious Condescension holds official monopoly on the homeworld and all its byproducts.   
CF: -> Every single caegar we invest on it goes directly to her.   
CF: -> And it's a lot of caegars.   
CR: eh, i was actually thinking about mixing my own, like i did with loferian and nastaffran soil  
CR: i'd only need a pot of the original for analysis and comparison  
CF: -> Your compounds have achieved a great deal of notoriety.  
CF: -> I hear even the Nasty herself is using your mix to try and wring a smidgen of life out of her thoroughly spent satellite.  
CR: rofl you call her that too?   
CF: -> There's a reason why that woman was never accepted into our society.  
CF: -> But I'm not sure how Her Imperious Condescension would take your initiative to replicate her property, or even the idea of you possessing it.  
CR: yeah, i was hoping to not let her know about that  
CF: -> Then you'll have to be really convincing when you explain to her why you're buying so little.  
CR: what, her? i'd be dealing with her?  
CF: -> Yes, and in person.  
CR: hahahahahahahaha NOPE  
CR: nooooooope  
CR: i guess it'll be trial and error time  
CF: -> One would think you'd be honored to speak to Her in person.  
CR: heh, i'm not keen on risking a peek at the great circus beyond so soon

In a sudden sourceless impulse, you elect to reveal slightly more than you ever dared reveal to anyone in your life not named Pascal.

CR: would hate to confirm it's not there :oP

She doesn't answer right away, but when she does, it's not as you expect.

CF: -> Interesting.  
CF: -> What would you say is there beyond, then?  
CR: frankly? idk, a whole lot of nothing  
CR: i just never really bought the messiah's truth, it just doesn't hold up to me idk  
CR: frankly just keeping up to date with the lingo can be a chore  
CR: but let's keep this between us, i'd hate to have to fend off my brothers' ire  
CF: -> So could one say you just pay lip service to the system?  
CR: eh, said that way it sounds a lot more hardcore than it actually is  
CR: but i guess it's one way to put it  
CF: -> In that case.  
CF: -> If the Highblood is willing to ignore the system,  
CF: -> There is a way to illegally obtain alternian soil.

That is when you're introduced to the Horticutter's ultimate secret resource — the Rim Market. To your surprise, it appears to be old news to nearly everyone in your crew; a commercial hub of dubious credentials, with wares of dubious quality, obtained by dubious means, operated, supplied and maintained by totally not pirates under a totally not at all flimsy truce. Nobody's been to it, but everyone's heard of it. An open secret.

It's not that strange in hindsight, but you're still shocked to learn that corsairs are known to assail the homeworld for wares.

"They're only rarely successful," says Visegrip, in one of her rare personal visits. She's back to what you call Horticutter Mode, where she drops all pretense of caste worship and becomes 120% Gardening Veteran. "The defenses around the homeworld are relentless. But at least once a sweep there's a great Auction of Actual Alternian Acquisitions, and soil is by far the most common product." She sips some of your ship's blend. "Even as high as an auction price runs, it'll run cheaper than Her Imperious Condescension's base price, most of all for the small amount you require. And if we're lucky they'll also have plant clippings and seeds in salvageable quality; I suggest you bring in twice as much money as you expect to spend, more if you can spare."

This sweep's auction has just recently passed, which gives you plenty of time to prepare. You take heed of Visegrip's counsel and, using the last few auctions and standard market prices as a base, you make a list of everything you want to buy and make it your aim to save a little over twice as much as they cost. You don't actually expect to be able to afford even half of it when the time comes— you just think it pays to aim a little past the finishing line.

You don't know whether it's meant as blessing or as torture, but the sweep goes by slower and thicker than bitumen, more eventful than you remember ever experiencing:

Fakiya's hair starts to discolor at the roots, lines begin to show in her face; she was already a veteran when you ascended, and she's deteriorating late for her blood— at least according to official medical texts— but it's bittersweet consolation. 

After the twenty-seventh dignitary verbally assumes Pascal is your moirail (he kept count), you two hold a small mental debate over the merits of officially running with it, and you finally add him to your quadrant roster in a move that made you feel more nervous and awkward than every concupiscent encounter you ever had put together— and they're always awkward as fuck. 

Your garden finally produces enough edible greens to complement your ship's supply, which puts your crew among the depressingly narrow number of the Best-Fed. The surplus sells at adequate profit. 

Miasma season comes and your rhododendron's shadow becomes quite disputed; when everyone walks out hale again even you are fairly convinced of its miraculous powers. 

You are officially decorated, ceremony and all, for running a Certifiably Hygienic Vessel for five sweeps in a row, but the Imperial Presentability Committee's Directormentor looks completely stumped when your Cleaning Squad marches up the stage behind you and salutes. You initially assume it was offense at the sight of so many rusties and browns, but are subsequently horrified to learn most ships of your rank don't have enough cleaners to form a squad, and don't bother with uniforms or allowances or even a timetable for them. 

Your rant about it on the forum's general discussion goes viral and becomes a weird fill-in-the-blanks meme. 

Your crew spontaneously throws a party in your honor. You never figure out what for.

Engisnër's team of tea blenders is accepted into the Vegetal Brewer's Guild, and suddenly they're raking in the dosh hand over fist. You know this because Pascal funnels his part straight into your savings. You'd feel bad, except he has never expressed desire for material possessions even in his own mind — other than whichever portable computer is currently touted as most practical, and those you just purchase on release under Required Equipment.

Thanks to all those profits, by the time the A3-Auction comes around you're actually approaching three times the base price you'd calculated for an entire small garden's worth of alternian flora, soil included. Shit's crazy. Your luck is something else. Maybe the Messiahs do smile down upon you?

#

Thus you find yourself at the Rim Market, Pascal to the right and Visegrip to your left, eyes roaming the rows and rows of collapsible pole stalls and its grubby, noisy occupants trying to hoist merchandise off. Disgusting-looking food, colorful knockoff wares, expensive but slightly scuffed tech offered for ludicrous bargains outside of their original packaging; it's all frankly quite overwhelming, and you're glad to learn the Auction sites are more _elite_. (Elite usually means empty.)

The Auction site for Actual Alternian Acquisitions is the cleanest, most official-looking place in the entire market. It has a wooden stage, dusty and unvarnished and somewhat wobbly-looking, and the curtains at its back and around the open-roofed enclosure have the unevenly-stained, stiff texture of blood that was applied straight from the corpse rather than properly processed into dye — possibly a threat display, as they're striped indigo-blue and purple with hanging ropes in violet — but a less discerning eye might forego these details in favor of the general sense of opulence. Brass _was_ after all as yellow as people assume real gold to be. 

In front of the stage are rows and rows of standardized but clearly long-deceased grubseats, their original fluids replaced with scalemate padding and garishly patterned fabric instead of their actual skins. You find this reasonable. If whoever ran this racket was able to waltz into a furniture store to order brand-new seats, they wouldn't be auctioning off their ill-gotten gains underground in an uncharted satellite.

For all the effort put on the seats, the place is deserted; you'd be surprised to learn there were more than a dozen trolls total in the block. Predictably everyone is seated as separately as physically possible, with at most a retainer sticking close to their higher-blooded master. Your group of three is basically a crowd. You find a decently-sized desert to settle upon, halfway to the back, where the chance of being overheard is minimum.

Visegrip is one of three indigobloods. Everyone else— excluding Pascal and a couple retainers— is either purple or violet. This is clearly a particularly elite gathering. 

A bell plays once; five minutes later, it plays twice. Still no more prospective buyers show up. The bell plays thrice, and the Au%oneer strides in, smiling, sparkling and oily, his bulky indigo build offset by his polished and fitted retainer's tux.

You don't look at Visegrip. You refuse to derive entertainment from an insult upon her caste.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!" the Au%oneer intones effusively, with arms open. "And lady," he nods to Visegrip— the only female in the room, you realize with a lurch. "How honored we are by your eminent presence! How proud we are to know such choice gazes will be laid upon our wares! And how proud am _I_ to proffer you this sweep's amazing, _record_ selection of Authentic Alternian Acquisitions!"

"Every sweep's selection is a record selection," Visegrip mutters. You twitch a corner of your mouth.

Impractically-dressed female trolls are climbing up to the dusty stage from somewhere behind the curtains, holding silk-covered trays and sacks and pots and several wheeled carts with tarpaulin-covered contents of varying bulk. 

Visegrip goes stiff by your side. You figure all those tarpaulins may be concealing something unpleasant. 

"Without further ado, the contents of this sweep's Auction!" the Au%oneer announces, sweeping his arms up and then toward the beginning of the line; at each announcement, an impractically-dressed female troll would uncover her ware with a fake-looking smile.

"A fifty-ounce mineral sample with traces of topaz and ruby! Two boxes of olive-grade sugar-coated pupa cereal in mint condition! Two boxes of _kit-kats_ in mint condition! A living FLARP-grub in mint condition! A vintage, twenty-sweep-old issue of Game-Grub in near-mint condition! A ten-pound sack of low-latitude soil!"

You twitch without meaning to. Low-latitude— possibly desertic? Not ideal— but— 

"A _fifty-pound_ mineral sample with visible veins of topaz and ruby!" the Au%oneer goes on, sounding particularly excited for something you cannot figure out a single use for. "A one-pound sack of assorted vegetation!" Damn! That and the soil. Yeah, that could work, even if the vegetation was just a bunch of toxic herbs— "Two-thirds of a drone's primary horn in near-mint condition!" Wait, what? "A _full-sized_ drone's horn, including the root, and in mint condition! A drone's severed upper-left forearm with all fingers and spurs attached! A drone's _severed head_ in _near-mint condition!_ " He pauses for effect, turning around to contemplate the newly-uncovered grisly object with a display of his perfect dentition. "And last— but _not least_..." 

The Au%oneer turns to his sparse audience, grin stretched to its maximum, arms open wide, eyes narrowed knowingly. The final tarpaulin-covered spectacle looks positively tiny and boring beside the horned, spurred, carapaced horror mask sitting lopsided on its display cart, and you cannot imagine what it might conceal that would be worth such theatrics. A drone's severed phallus?

After the thoroughly unnecessary dramatic pause, the Au%oneer takes a long step, reaches out with his wide, white-gloved hand and yanks the tarpaulin off with a flourish; behind the cart, the impractically-dressed female stretches her smile to the very limits of believability. 

The Au%oneer tosses the tarpaulin to the floor victoriously. You haven't even processed what you're looking at yet.

"Yes, my Lords," he says, voice shaking with almost believable emotion, and apparently forgetting about Visegrip entirely, "ours was quite the lucky haul this sweep. She's in perfect, mint condition! Yes, even where it _matters_. Fully trained and conditioned by our psychic experts in a wide range of one and two and even _three_ -word commands. The full list will be yours upon purchase, of course! Full compliance _gua-ran-teed_. Nothing in her mind but her duty towards _you_!"

You finally get what you're looking at.

It's a kid.

A vacant-eyed, slack-jawed, thin-limbed, pot-bellied pupa. 

You look into her mind, and what you see curdles your soul.

"Look how soft her glistening, unmarked skin! No scars at all!" The Au%oneer winks. "We _checked!_ " He motions pointlessly with his gloved hands. "Look at her _chub!_ Hers was truly a dutiful lusus. Oh!" He stumbled back in overacted surprised. "Her _feet!_ So small. So dainty! But I see the claws are a little overgrown," he turned to the seats, smiling sheepishly, shrugging his immense shoulders.

If it was meant to be a joke, you have never felt farther from mirth. 

"A prize to look forward to after long, boring work nights," intones the Au%oneer, leaning down to pick the tarpaulin from the floor. "Some _fresher meat_ than your newbie squads!" He gives the tarpaulin a good shake, and then carefully covers the slack-jawed kid. "But first..."

One by one, the impractically-clad females cover their wares and wheel them offstage, starting with the completely still, tarpaulin-covered kid.

You finally turn to look at Visegrip. She hasn't been this stiff and closed-off since she first stepped onto your ship on that garden inspection, sweeps and sweeps ago. 

"So," you say, and then you don't say anything more.

Visegrip swallows, chews on the inside of her mouth, and then finally speaks.

"Children are sometimes a by-product of illegal homeworld incursions," she concedes.

You recede towards Pascal's mind. Not quite a recoil, but close enough. He meets you halfway, like he used to back when you were two easily overwhelmed kids in an overwhelming world. 

You prop each other up through your shock, and together the minds of Eudora and Pascal manage to form a single functional, sharp-minded entity. 

"What is the appeal of a child slave?" you two ask— through Eudora's mouth, the mouth with greater social clout.

"I believe," Visegrip says cold and toneless, "that some enjoy the illusion of sharply heightened physical and mental power over someone else."

"And?" you collectively coax. One of you has picked up on the fact that she had more to say. The other half-listens as the Au%oneer attempts to imbue a hunk of rock with a vague aura of unspecified desirability. 

"Others," she intones, eyes nearly as vacant as the child's, "seek pleasure in smaller orifices."

Your minds confer amongst themselves in wordless synapses, faster than a blink.

"That child is a pail-slave," you speak with the voice of Eudora. "Her commands are pailing commands. She's not well-fed. She's bloated and malnourished. She was mind-raped until she stopped reacting. That fish-face on the left five rows to the front has his hand in his pants." 

Visegrip snaps out of her overformal stance with a gasp; her eyes move wildly between seats before coming back to Eudora's face in surprise. Eudora is, after all, glaring intently at her, and has been for a while; the one to spot the seadweller in question was Pascal. 

You seem to detect visible alarm in Visegrip's face. You haven't been managing Eudora's at all— it's not projecting any expression. Faces are hard to manage on the best of days, even for the more accomplished Eudora; you concentrate on what matters, which is obtaining info.

"How much does a kid go for?" you ask. 

She tells you a number. It's big. 

"We're buying that kid," you say, not caring that you messed up the pronoun. You came as a group; that's enough for her to build up a convenient assumption. 

"B-but," Visegrip is visibly recollecting herself. "She—" She stops. She stares into the stage and the raised hands of nonchalant seadwellers. She sighs. "You said it yourself. She was psychically— she's basically a— a child _drone_. These kids are mentally crushed until there's nothing left to react, she's just... meat? She's better off—"

"I'm psychic," you say; as resolution takes form in both your minds, you disengage enough that Pascal can turn most of his mind to his portable device, and you, Eudora, are left to handle the task of setting Visegrip straight. "I looked. I _saw._ "

You sigh. Pascal is already writing back to the crew on the ship, about the change of plans, about the impending waste of their hard-earned money. It breaks your heart, it really does, to remember how they contributed in the expectation of the bigger, homeworld-themed garden that they won't get. 

But this soil would have tainted it.

"She's still there," you tell Visegrip, finally. "She's cowering deep down and far away, and she's given up hope on ever coming back. But she's still there, and as long as she's there I can't give her away."

She nods, thoughtful and silent and, you secretly think to Pascal, impressed. Ours is a rotten universe, you think at him as you pop your rings out one by one, that this shit happens and even a blueblood just grits her teeth through it. But then again don't we grit our teeth through a lot as well? We do what we can to survive in this shit universe, and only sometimes we get to yank someone else out of the muck. I'll be back soon, but these might sell for less here.

(Sometimes you neither know nor care who's thinking what in your head.)

You watch impassively as some shit cereal you both distinctly remember hating is sold for a contextual fortune; you half-watch as Pascal pawns off some rings you're glad to have an excuse not to wear for a while. The kit-kat is highly disputed as well, and sold for entirely too much more than it would ever be worth. The soil and leaves engender an intense bidding war, which you watch with only some slightly envious pangs; for some reason, the big chunk of rock is even more sought after, disputed by two seadwellers, a purple and an indigo. 

Sometimes the exhibitionist seadweller makes a bid, but it's clear he doesn't actually care. He's sprawled across three grubseats, one leg hooked over a seat's back, and making no attempt to conceal the activities of his other hand; the Au%oneer doesn't react to him in any way other than to cheerfully acknowledge his bogus bids, and the other bidders ignore him in stoic silence.

The scattered bits of drone generate more interest than you can understand at the moment. Maybe if there wasn’t a kid involved, you might find it reasonable— a collectible? A trophy? A reminder? Just something cool?— but at the moment...

Nothing actually reaches even half the price the kid is worth. For the most part nothing even reaches the prices that were reached in the previous sweep's auction; if you'd bought the soil and the plants, you'd have been left with a ridiculous surplus. It occurs to you that, perhaps in other occasions, even the useless curios would have generated higher revenue.

It's a thought that fills you with cold contempt.

The bidding for drone carcasses goes by teeth-grindingly slow. Outside, Pascal has added another couple dozen thousand caegars to your funds; at some point he returns so you can discreetly hand off your choker and a sealed box of stardust with the holographic certificate of authenticity that marks it as blessed by the Grand Highblood himself. You'd bought it upon ascension and never opened it, which should probably make it vintage or somesuch; you only kept it around in case other purples got in your case about faith. Authenticated merchandise could shut a surprising amount of mouths.

The bidding on the girl has already started by the time you get a confirmation of your additional funds. She's standing stock-still on her cart, again exposed, tarpaulin aside. You watch in silence as every single bidder raises her price by small increments, and Visegrip stares at your expressionless face in confusion.

You're not bidding.

The exhibitionist seadweller doubles the bid, raising his smeared hand lazily and snickering just loud enough to carry.

You still don't bid.

The other bidders play it slow and safe, never straying from the small incremental bids.

The nasty one doubles the bid again.

The others still don't change their strategy.

You still don't bid.

The Au%oneer calls once.

You don't bid.

The Au%oneer calls twice.

The exhibitionist bids by an increment.

Another seadweller bids by an increment.

The Au%oneer calls once.

You don't bid.

The exhibitionist again bids by an increment.

A blueblood bids by an increment.

The Au%oneer calls once.

The exhibitionist bids by another increment.

You stand up and double the bid.

There's a comical clatter as heads and torsos turn to stare at your raised thumb. Visegrip slowly stands up by your side, possibly for moral support.

The exhibitionist turns to you and makes a face you don't much pay attention to. It doesn't matter; the Au%oneer calls once, then twice, then announces her sold.

You waste no time in walking up to the stage. It's not the done thing, but you don't care; you kick the discarded tarpaulin aside, take off your half-cape, wrap the diminutive child and pick her up one-handed. With the other hand you give the Au%oneer a sack of caegars.

Pascal walks in with the other sack of caegars. He sets it in your hand and you hand it over to the Au%oneer as well.

"Keep the change," you half-mumble, before turning to get off the stage. The impractically-clad woman waves a piece of paper your way; you ignore it, then take a step back and yank it off her hand as Pascal reminds you that you need to know _what not to say_. 


	2. Chapter 2

By the time you stop to think again, you're boarding your shuttle back to the ship. Your breath comes out in an explosive decompression.

"Well," you say to Visegrip. She claps your free shoulderpad in sympathy.

The crew is grim when you enter your ship, awaiting and apprised of the circumstances. One of the weapon technicians offers you his chair, the closest to the transportalizer; you collapse onto it, unresponsive kid on your lap and all, and start shaking.

"This is not what any of us had in mind," you say, in a voice so steady you can't believe it's coming out of your mouth. "But if I let it happen I could never call myself a troll again. All paths before me woulda let you down."

Everyone starts talking at once. It's too much for you to parse, and Pascal is also too rattled to be of help, but you get the feeling they're being supportive. There's a lot of crying and a lot of anger; Engisnër is methodically ripping her portable decorative towelette into strips, even as her scrunched face drips with tears.

Solace — a junior shield technician — punches her station with an impressive snarl.

"We should bombard these fuckers from _orbit!_ " she screams, to loud and generalized cheering.

"No," says Visegrip, flatly.

It's her turn to be the center of a gaggle of indistinct voices, although this time they seem quite more hostile. But she remains unflapped, merely signing for silence until silence happens.

"It would be no use," she goes on. "Any pirate in the Rim Market is an expendable pirate. And the whole lot of them put together wouldn't count a single percent of all the pirates out there. The scum would merely scurry off to some other cranny and rebuild." Her eyes narrow. "And don't believe for a second that Lord Wrathtor's money remained any longer in that satellite than he himself did— more than one patron has thought to rid themselves of hypothetical witnesses before, and such largesse is not to be risked." She shakes her head. "No— it's best that the Market remains exactly where we know it is."

"Well, it was your idea to go there and buy from their sort!" someone points out angrily; you have no idea who, as you've reached the rocking-back-and-forth stage of being done with reality. Predictably other voices rise in agreement. You could swear most of them are just making random mouth noises.

"Don't just assume pirates are a monolith!" She snaps. "Do you think every single pirate out there is fine with selling pupas? The vast majority turned their back to the Empire because they found _their own pupahoods_ too harsh to withstand! The Rim Market may be their version of a neutral zone, but take a single step outside and the factions within would gladly slit each other's throats in defense of their own warped sense of honor. For every child escorted to the Auction, there's a child sniped out of their misery in transit. One who resorts to the Rim Market must hope for the best and expect the worst."

She stops, sighs. Her shoulders droop. She palms her forehead with a tired hand.

"I was naive," she concedes. "For the past few sweeps, the Market has been— relatively clean. The dominant faction looked down harshly on troll retail regardless of merchandise age— I understand their alliance was comprised mostly of criminal fugitives. Thus pupas were peddled off-season and... directly to known customers. But it seems a power-shift is underway. My superiors must learn of this." She grins ruefully at your mostly mollified crew. "Outside of my gardening managerial duties, I _am_ part of the corsair-cleaning effort. This is my actual night job."

The atmosphere clears a little. Your crew scatters unhurriedly back to their duties, and some stick around to talk to Visegrip about hers. Isn't attending the Rim Market the same as consorting with the enemy? Would she be safe from her superiors? But from what you pick up the Corsair-Cleaners aren't even pretending to be able to get rid of pirates. To truly vanquish them would take an actual war campaign and require an absurd amount of resources. Instead, they make sure the rabble remains scattered and disorganized and at odds with each other. It seems to require a lot of exciting espionage and boring diplomacy.

On your lap, the wrapped child remains completely unresponsive, eyes roaming vaguely over the bustling trolls around you. A dollop of drool trails down her chin. She doesn't react to it. Floating on the surface of her mind you detect the awareness that any of these adult shapes could initiate her service.

Shhhhyeah.

Someone from the cleaning squad approaches. It's Frigna; thank god for nametags, because your facial recognition is gone. She kneels down in front of your seat, which is weird because you specifically don't require kneeling or kowtowing, but then she pulls out a couple of captchalogue cards.

"I sewed up some stuff real quick, lord," she says, already decaptchaloguing some shabby-looking bundles. You recognize a very long shirt and a couple pants of varying length.

"Oh, dang! Awesome!" You let slip with complete sincerity. It _is_ great thinking, and not just the clothes; you understand now that she knelt so as to seem less menacing to the child, a gesture which moves your feelings through widths and depths unknown and leaves you flabbergasted and overwhelmed. It's not even directed at you, and it's such a simple notion, but you're filled with pride. You send Pascal a note to give Frigna's bonus a bonus.

Frigna isn't paying attention to your attack of fuzzies. She smoothes up the shirt and displays it proudly— but the girl turns her head away from it and from Frigna's brilliant grin, the first actual movement you ever saw her make unprompted.

Frigna blinks, then moves her shirt to the side. Again the girl turns away, just enough to get the shirt out of her field of view. Frigna raises the shirt almost to your shoulder, and the girl moves her head back to look over Frigna's shoulder instead.

"I— I guess she doesn't like it?" Frigna muses awkwardly, pulling the shirt back. "I mean, it has no symbol, I'd be offended too—"

"No," you clarify, as calmly as you can. You were paying attention. "It's part of her programming. Looking at clothes means pain."

And then you turn over your free shoulder and puke.

#

The girl doesn't fight off the shirt, at least. She doesn't react to being maneuvered into clothes at all.

A tentative discussion follows on her care and feeding. _Can_ she eat or drink on her own? What caused her bloated belly? Someone raises the possibility that she was given commands for the necessary stuff a creepy pedo wouldn't care to help her with, like eating and bathing.

"Assuming they didn't co-opt all food terms for genitalia-related activities," they add morosely, and the vaguely hopeful mood immediately nosedives. Morale in your ship has never been this low.

You hand off your grisly list to Pascal and shy away from his mind as he browses it. You apologize for being a coward, but he assures you that as long as you're enough of a coward to not let a kid be raped he can be brave enough to read a perv list.

Apparently if you touch anything to her mouth and tell her to swallow she'll do it. A fiery death is simply not enough for some people. But hey! The list assures the crew that she has been trained _not_ to chew under any circumstances. Frigna cries as she mops up your oopsie. A kitchen crew who stood witness in his squad's name promises a wide variety of extra-nourishing soups.

Visegrip promises to investigate the child's provenance. "And not just my outfit— I know pirate crews who would jump at the opportunity," she assures you. "Some are known to give their batteries administraitor rights to ram any confirmed slaver transport regardless of shielding; that's how seriously they take it."

Giving a ship battery any admin rights at all is enough of a terrifying notion for you. And it's a grim reminder as well; for how much you trust your personnel, you cannot take any risks after all this effort.

Having seen Visegrip off, you carry your new acquisition down to the Engine Block. It's downtime and most services are idling; there's only one technician on duty, hunched and seeming quite relaxed in front of a game board.

"Lord," he says as you walk in, standing up with enviable calm before saluting. "We all heard about it. Talcha is up to date."

Talcha is the battery. You tend to avoid thinking about him. He's only a couple sweeps older than you are, and not only is the same caste but has very similar horns and symbol to Pascal— every time you look at him you're filled with equal parts horror, relief and guilt.

You do know Pascal likes to hang out with him every now and then. Pascal also hand-picked every battery technician onboard. You forcibly push the matter out of your mind; the ship _must_ move, and you've done what you could.

You nod to the technician, then adjust the child's weight on your arms to disguise your woolgathering.

"Our surveillance system—" you begin hesitantly— "covers all habitable parts, right?"

"Yes?" the technician answers in confusion. Surveillance is not actually any technician's responsibility, only Talcha's and arsoncurity's, and even the latter would only be notified of anything the former detected— but the techies would have been the ones to set the system. "Everything except private blocks, as you requested."

You nod and gather yourself. The next part is going to sound weird.

"I can't— that is, more often than not, I'll have to leave the child by herself as I go about my duties. She could... hurt herself in her state. Have my blocks added to Talcha's monitoring."

The technician nods.

"Also," you add, before you second-guess yourself, "in the hopeful eventuality that the child recovers enough to wander... I'd like Talcha to keep an eye out for her safety." You pause. "As a personal request."

The technician nods again, and salutes. "It shall be done, Lord." And then, apropos of nothing: "It is an honor to serve under you."

It surprises a little laugh out of you. You can't think of anything cool to say in return, so you just dip your head in silent thanks before doing the sign for dismissal; the technician does his slow nod again before leaning in front of Talcha's terminal screen, reading something off it and moving a piece in his board game.

You pause in front of the door and watch as the technician stiffens over the board, then scatters the pieces.

"Another one," the techie mutters with a sigh, rearranging the board; Talcha's screen is immediately flooded with yellow characters scrolling in a little dance.

You leave them to their game. There are other things to arrange for the (literal) new kid, such as permissions and identification, but you're not in any condition to think on what steps they would entail or the fact that you don't know her name and she can't give it to you.

In the meantime Pascal has dug a new recuperacoon out from somewhere, and, with help from the cleaning squad, has rearranged your block around it. You go there and check with your own eyes. The new, smaller coon is pushed up against a corner, and some shelves and unused tables are placed so as to separate the area around it from the rest of your quarters. A mini-block for the pupa.

The cleaning squad salutes and leaves, and you swallow the temptation to have them stay. You don't think you should be left alone with the kid. You don't think _anyone_ should be left alone with the kid.

Pascal does the thing where he pinches the back of your hand, and out of habit you peek inside his mind. What you see surprises you enough to turn around on your heels.

Your old recuperacoon has been replaced with a bifurcated one. Pascal stands at its side, somehow not looking the least bit sheepish even though you're right inside his head and _know_ that he is.

But... that's good. If he's around to double-check, you'll feel a lot more confident in this. Together, you manage to feed her the soup the cooking staff sent up— or rather, you feed her as you babble vague support, while Pascal babbles vague support inside your stormy head.

That done, you suddenly wonder if she's capable of handling her biological functions on her own. Pascal expects the worst, and pulls out the cursed command list; still, you set her down in front of the load gaper and hope she'll know what it's for.

Inside her mind you can tell that she does, but she still doesn't move. She won't risk it.

In the end you storm out of the block, while Pascal speaks the combination of words that'll let her know he doesn't have a fetish for watching a kid soil herself.

#

What comes out of her for nearly an entire week does not look like it was ever once food. You're pretty sure there's blood in it; there's definitely blood when she pukes, which is often, and always involves undigested nasty-looking chunks that definitely weren't in the soups.

She grows even thinner, but at least her creepily distended belly deflates into something proportional. Gradually, you begin to believe she expelled most of whatever nastiness she'd been fed before. The soups stay down. Frigna gives you a marked thread so you can measure around her arm, and when its circumference stops shrinking the ship collectively sighs in relief.

She's still silent and vague-eyed, but now at least the previously flat expanse of her mind's surface is stirring; pain is not forthcoming, and she doesn't understand why, and she expects a nasty surprise at any moment. She braces. She resolves, although you don't know what to, and you refuse to dip in any deeper.

You hope the time comes soon when she reacts to your probing, but for now all she does is passively accept your presence.

The nights drag on tense and terse, with her alone and unattended in your block and you unhappily pacing the command center. Your unexplainable good luck continues unabated— Engisnër's tea receives some sort of endorsement, your crew is commissioned for several easy, overpriced hunts and purges, you broker deals, you get deals, your garden surplus sells at unheard of premiums. And then, every night, either you or Pascal return to the disappointment of an untouched block, and to her obediently standing in front of her coon, scrupulously within its assigned boundaries.

You cover your shelves in plasticky knick-knacks in hopes she breaks or misplaces something, but night after night they remain untouched; and eventually you come in and collapse on a chair and wish you were the kind of person who'd mercy-kill her and spare yourself the anguish.

She mumbles.

"Hey," it sounds like.

You don't breathe. Words can be dicey to make out at times, but the fact is there was a sound and it came from her.

"Hello?" You mumble back, your deeper adult voice sounding suspicious and menacing to your own ears.

Her eyes are fixed into a nothingness halfway to the floor. You distinctly see her lips move.

"Hey," she says again, soft and tentative.

"Hey," you answer. You don't touch her mind, but you sort of pat inwards until you touch Pascal's and then you kind of shake him while screaming mentally.

For some long minutes she says nothing else; but her body and her eyes and her fingers are tense like a coiled spring, and you wait, breathing shallow and silent, not moving a muscle.

"I'm here," she finally says, hesitant, still unmoving. One of her fingers twitch minimally.

"Yes," you say, as soft as you can make it. "That's good."

Silence descends again. Her eyes dart around, then stop. Her nervous finger freezes. She becomes a statue.

You wait.

Her stillness breaks not with words, but with breathing. Her chest rises and falls, at first slow and shallow, and then progressively more ragged. Her eyes dart, then stop; dart, then stop, and her fingertips touch each other in little pinches even as her arms lie frozen at her sides.

It's her training, you realize with distant wonder, or maybe it was Pascal. She was trained to not fidget and she's fidgeting, and she's panicking and it's making her fidget, and that's good and you're glad but it must suck for her and that's kind of killing you—

"Aren't you _going to?_ " She shouts, high and sudden with eyes trained anywhere but at you.

"Whu-what?" You startle near out of your seat, but thankfully she doesn't bolt or spook. If anything she seems even more incensed.

"To _grab_ me!" She screams, shrill and terrified and she leans forward from her beaten-in stance as if she's willing her voice to physically hit your face.

"Uh— no!" You all but squeak, thoroughly knocked askew. "I mean— I, I just don't think you'd appreciate that very much, I don't think—"

She shrieks, a deathly terrifying sound like a billion sharpening knives, and she grabs the nearest plasticky souvenir and launches it at you.

It flies far off the mark, but still you are _delighted_. She's awake! And she hates you! You slide down your seat and kneel to the floor, hands raised in defeat even as she finally risks looking at you long enough to aim, even as you are finally pelted by her projectiles. You laugh, and your eyes fill up with tears.

" _SHUT UP!_ " She screams and launches at you, little white teeth glinting, and you don't move; her jaws close around your arm and it actually kind of hurts. You're pretty sure the warmth in the area is as much your blood as it is her spit.

Just as suddenly as she bit you, she lets go and steps back, staring at you with wild fearful eyes. Her fists open and close in time with her shaky breaths. A line of purple blood runs down her chin. But she stands there, waiting for your reaction, not running away.

You want to laugh and you want to cry and you want to, like, praise her and tell her she's very brave and give her a hug, but you don't figure any of that will alarm her any less than she already is, so instead you clutch the diminutive mark on your arm and say "Oooooow!" and fall back in an outrageous cartwheel; she stares and doesn't react, so you roll around with another extravagant groan.

That does encourage her to speak again, with a choked little voice completely lacking in mirth.

"...are you mocking me?" she says, and she sounds so sad and hopeless.

"No!" you say, rising onto your knees so fast something cricks at your back. "Sorry! I wanted to make you laugh."

"...why?" she asks, again soft and confused.

"Because you're sad!" you blurt out. "And the things that happened to you are so sad, and I want you to not be sad."

She looks lost for a moment.

"Do you want me to laugh then?" she asks, a little more firmly.

"Ugh, not if the joke is bad," you cringe at yourself. "Sometimes a brother says a joke, and it's actually awful, and then everybody tries to laugh anyway because he's a purple, and that's the literal worst, so. Laugh when you're happy. If you're not happy then don't laugh."

"Um," she says, opening and closing her fists again, eyes unfocused as if in deep thought. Then she looks up at you. "You're different from other clowns," she says.

"Yeah," you nod thoughtfully. "Anyway, are you hungry? I've got a cookie," you decaptchalogue a half-eaten and slightly stale cookie you'd forgotten about in the latest stress, "it's still good," you try to justify its state as you hand it over, "it's got little chocolate drops and all."

She picks it up and stares at it vaguely. You wonder if whatever high she'd been riding before is abating now, but she already bit you; biting a cookie is small tubercles in comparison. And you want to make sure the biting sticks— you want her to be able to eat real food.

With slow vagueness, she raises the cookie to her mouth, experimentally closes her bloodied teeth around it. She doesn't _bite_ -bite, but pulls the cookie downwards; stale as it was, it doesn't so much break as sort of bends and rips unappetizingly. She pays this fact no notice. You watch in rapt attention as she works the ripped piece inwards, not with her teeth but with her tongue, and closes her mouth around it.

After several seconds, her jaw moves. In her malnourished state, you can easily follow the working muscles, the bones moving under sunken cheeks. She chews slowly, sort of distracted, sort of thoughtful, until she gradually stops chewing at all.

You've been watching like a sharp-eyed beakbeast, and you know she hasn't swallowed yet. Is... is she going to need the verbal command for swallowing? Sweet galloping messiahs, you can't do that. You probably should, but you can't. Actually, you forgot what it was, or you had until Pascal helpfully threw it out there for you, because yeah, you probably should, this kid can't go at it all at once, but—

You're startled out of your thoughts by a sudden weird keening noise, and look up to the girl's twisted, crying mask of a face. You stare in confusion as she turns around and stumbles drunkenly back into her little alcove to huddle against the wall between the coon and a shelf, sobbing and howling and keening, and sometimes pausing to bite more cookie.

You jump to your feet and run to your private terminal and punch in the comm code to the cooking block before you even consciously remember what the code consists of.

"Lord Wrathtor!" the kitchen squad's sergeant squeals at you, teary-faced, hands clasped under his chin. "We heard! Secretancillary Pascal has kept us apprised! How _wonderful!_ "

"Yes!" You nod dumbly at him. "But I need more cookies! I gave her one but it was stale and now she's crying."

"Oh, Lord Wrathtor," the sergeant shakes his head all wise-like. "She's not crying because it was stale. She's crying because hope hurts! We'll send more cookies up, of course, and some warm and filling mashed potatoes for you both, but if milord will allow me to speak out of turn, I believe milord would do well to allow her to pour her emotions out at her own pace. Milord definitely broke through to her— we should all expect many outbursts from now on!"

The sergeant used to be a cold, impassive behavioral enforcer under your starting crew's previous captain, so you figure he knows from repressed emotions.

"I see," you say, mostly for the sake of making noise. "Okay then, in that case. I'll be waiting," and you turn the screen off.

The cookies arrive as promised, two entire containers of them, and you nervously eat half of one before you come to your senses and set it aside. The unopened one, you carefully slide into her little cranny, then towards the sound of her long diminished sobs.

You don't actually remember falling asleep, but you wake up on the bifurcated coon with Pascal nonetheless, feeling a headache like some sort of abscess in your head is finally draining out.


	3. Chapter 3

The child... recovers, in fits and bursts. She spends day and night in her coon at first, only the top of her head visible, squirreling her food in with a scrawny, nervous hand and pushing emptied containers out to clamber down the rounded carapace to the floor. Not a single one of you— not you personally, not Pascal and not the cleaning crew— is not utterly thrilled to find them empty every time. 

When you eventually decide both her and the coon can no longer put off cleaning, you drag it up to the ablution block's door so she can slip out and inside without being exposed to you; you slip in a change of clothes after her and Pascal turns the hot water on remotely, and she locks herself in for hours while the cleaning crew thoroughly sanitizes the soiled recuperacoon. (She did her necessities inside it, of course. The... fresher... drops look firm and devoid of blood. Your onboard lethalchemist asks for samples to examine just in case.)

Its halfway through morning when she stumbles out of the ablution block into the darkened quarters, and you squint through insomnia-sandy eyes to spy her reaction to her coon's new location— now flush against the wall adjacent to the the ablution block's door— and the small, glowy little toys you set around the entrance to her slightly enlarged cranny to make sure she didn't walk past it. 

She clambers up the oversized coon all while making tiny, half-swallowed sniffling sounds, and slips inside with the speed of a noodle being sucked by a pair of pursed lips. You try not to snicker. Sleep comes easy after. 

She still won't come out of her coon in your presence, but Talcha has now taken to sending you fascinating little reports and videos of her activities when alone in your quarters. Mostly she'd just go straight to the ablution block and then back, but not two nights after she began to sneak careful steps out of her way— glancing furtively around her wall-shelves, picking a plastic figurine and quickly putting it back where it originally was, rising on tip-toes to peek onto your desktop. She comes out of an ablution excursion with her hair neatly combed once, and gelled down into place with what you recognize, with a wince, as your Grand-Highblood-endorsed facial grease (Pascal replaces the insides with a more appropriate product after that), and to your delight sits on your high padded chair, scoots back until her ankles are barely dangling out of the seat. 

She solemnly looks about from her new vantage point, leans back, looks lost in thought for a long time; eventually she starts making little movements with her hands which you eventually discover to be... play. Alone in your block, sitting on your chair, she entertains herself by walking her fingers over her knees, on the armrest, on the back of the chair— she turns around and climbs on her knees, engrossed in her wicked little roleplay— and then moves onto the table, where the two little people represented by her hands take turns kicking each other with the two stubby fingers they were walking upon. One of them does a sick little flying leap. Her right hand emerges victorious.

The video makes the rounds in your ship, and where morale was low before, it has now suddenly skyrocketed. You send it privately to Visegrip in the forum, and after some pondering with Pascal, elect to take the next step in Operation Spit In The Eyes Of Our Uncaring Messiahs.

You return to quarters for the night, cleanse, bathe, put on your ugliest and largest coon outfit, a charming little striped number that looks absolutely hideous and clashes with everything. Throughout, of course, she remains ensconced inside the coon. (Thank fuck it's your mix, and decently restful. Lowblood mixes are the worst.)

You approach the coon, stop just outside by one of the shelves. "Hey kiddo," you call out, somehow managing to sound genuinely cheerful rather than nervous. "Wanna thumb-wrestle?"

She peeks one suspicious little eye over the rim of her coon. Her hair is still glued down by facial grease— you hope it doesn't do anything funny to her scalp, you always did hate that brand. 

As a response to her scathing but unvoiced question, you set your fist on the top shelf in front of her, thumb up, and plant some sort of commemorative box in front of it. "C'mon!" you say, hopefully enticingly. "This is just a warm-up match, you got a long way to go for the real damn championship yet."

Her little eye remains unimpressed, but after a small pause she raises one defiant little arm and smacks it down on the improvised booster box, angry and decisive. Her entire fist pushes against two of your knuckles, and her tiny thumb near sinks into yours, with your calluses and all.

Even through the rosy mist of wigglerhood memories, you recall the evenings spent with Pascal and his lusus, the two of you frowning over your center table, knuckle against knuckle, thumb against thumb. You don't recall who came up with the idea, or the method, only that it had worked, beautifully.

You feel her push against your thumb, angrily, not with all her strength yet— why should she even try to, when you're clearly so much bigger and stronger than her?— but hard enough to let you know she is humoring your highbloodedness but won't pretend to be happy about it. You let her get a good feel for your immobile finger; then you tense your thumb, not push, just tense it a bit against hers, and at the same time you carefully touch the surface of her mind. Not push, just touch.

You haven't peeked into her mind since she started recovering. She pulls back in alarm— thumb and head— to look at you with frightened eyes, and in response you immediately retreat— thumb and telepathy, and grin all innocent-like.

"What's this?" You say, lighter than you feel. "You gotta push back! Train up that thumb, kiddo, wrestling is real as fuck and not at all fake, and that all of goes to thumb-wrestling too. Next round?"

You set your fist back in place, rearrange the little box, offer your thumb. She stares at you, and stares and stares, and you stand still as a statue, knowing she's waiting and has a right to wait, and that she's testing and has a right to test, and finally she raises her arm again— defiant again, suspicious but decisive— and push knuckle against knuckle, thumb against thumb.

She pushes harder, more seriously, and you let her, thumb unmoving without effort. And then you tense it, and touch her mind.

Of course, she doesn't get it. Even if she had some sort of psychic skill, and the brown blood she constantly evacuated argued for animal communion at most, children are hardly encouraged to so much as hope for psychic shielding. But when you tensed your finger hers tensed against yours, and she pushed with all her might and a little growl besides; and as she pushed you let your thumb relax back, and let your mental touch fade, until she pushed your thumb enough to bend it back a little.

"Hmmmmmmmmm," you concede gravely, only half-trying to not grin too wide. "Not bad for a first try. Why, we might make a thumb wrestler of you yet." And you narrow your eyes in mock-menace. "Care for _another round?_ "

She narrows her eyes at you again, and smacks her little fist back onto the little box in challenge. And for the several further matches you would play that morning, she did not manage to manifest a mental shield even once, but that was par for the course, after all; what mattered was that she believed she had, that she build up the proper associations. Mental shields are a mental thing, and brains are funky stuff. 

It was nights and nights of thumb-wrestling him, and herself when alone, until the notion truly coalesced— until the tension in her thumb truly translated into her imagined mental effort, when her mind deliberately touched yours, and she knew it right away, as Pascal once had; and your grin was not the least bit disguised when she stared at your face in wide-eyed wonderment. 

"You have Done It," you say, with affected, mirthful gravitas. "You have grasped the Hidden Secret of Thumb Wrestling. And now, may I know the name of my Pupil?"

She stares at you over the coon-hole, no longer peeking, no longer suspicious, and her gravitas is not the least bit faked when she answers. 

"Zaphir Umbria."

Zaphir Umbria is added to the ship roster as Junior Trainee.

#

When Zaphir finally steps out into the bridge, shyly and hunched and all a-spooked behind your leg, the active crew utterly failed to maintain the restraint you’d emphatically requested of them, opting instead to climb their respective seats and clap and holler, and, in one case, fall down and conk their horn and roll around moaning. 

She laughs at the display, and you immediately inform Pascal to give their bonuses a bonus.

You fake displeasure and imperiously orders Galiom to stay his ass right there on the floor and entertain the guest (a little peek in his case is all you need to determine his conk is worse than he’s letting on) and little by little the bridge approaches something resembling order. You review shit, get the news and the reports and shit, even field a couple calls, during which Galiom and Zaphir crawl under the controls and fail to not giggle loud enough to be overheard. You actually failed to parse their sounds as such the first time around, which caused quite the impression in the comm officers and certainly explained your interlocutor’s increasing agitation and befuddlement, but in the following calls you were also kind of struggling to keep a straight face. 

It was pretty fun.

Sundra comes to relieve Galiom ahead of schedule, and Galiom makes a truly heroic effort to skip and not stumble out on his way to the mediculler’s bay; Engisnër takes up his slack by pulling out a box of crayons and a bunch of misprinted sheets, and for the next hour or so Zaphir is thoroughly engaged in scribbling nearly recognizable portraits of your present company, which she then presents to the subject with great pomp and pride. (Your portrait has an astounding number of fingers and one huge thumb. You love it.)

Navitrix praises her draftsmanship to high heavens, and foresees for her a bright and successful career as the crew’s next star-mapper. Zaphir proceeds to draw her a map; it’s a wonky hive with a rock, a tree, a cactus and a smiling moon scattered around it at random. Navitrix accepts it with heavy solemnity and pins it by the local coordinate maps, then stands there and keeps looking at it, hands behind her back, as if studying the ugly little scribble with great interest.

You tell Pascal to give her bonus’ bonus a bonus.

Fakiya breezes in with her usual aroma, drops to the floor like a push-up champ and immediately strikes conversation with her fellow brownie. She clearly cuts a striking figure to the child; her hair is nearly all silver, her face lined and scarred and her eyes bright and glad, cheeks browned and freckled from garden light, peeling from the shoulders, miraculous healthy skin showing underneath. Fakiya has hit the upper limit of her lifespan, possibly with a brick, and then kicked it on her way past. 

(You rue the day it catches up, and you know it is; Fakiya’s naps in the garden are growing longer. She braces for it, and so does the ship.)

Zaphir tells her she stinks, to your great approval; somehow they still seem to get along, and soon Fakiya is sweeping the child in her arms, effortlessly, announcing she’s introducing her to the Miracle Rhododendron. You’d planned on showing Zaphir to the garden; might as well take this opportunity. It’s the night cycle still. You follow them.

Zaphir is impressed and delighted, pokes the plants, even the ones that bite, and you let her except for the venomous ones. She picks a fruit, looks dubiously at you for approval, bites it, makes a wreath of flowers for Fakiya, then leans over and plants one on your hair—

“Only one because you don’t need it,” she says casually, and Fakiya barks out in delighted laughter. 

Fakiya leads her to the lusus pen, a fantastic idea you hadn’t considered, and they greet the animals together, or something— you don’t stick your mental nose in, just make sure Zaphir is looking happy still. Then Fakiya puts her down and cricks her back really loud and with an exaggerated groan; you take the hint and entice Zaphir away with a mention of the kitchens. 

The kitchen squad pampers her like there’s no tomorrow. She stumbles out sleepy and full, and you take her back to your block, slip her into the coon. 

Sometime during the next shift, Talcha lets you know she left the room on her own. 

(Pascal keeps track, and sends members of the cleaning squad to likely destinations. They dutifully clean what is already clean until she wanders away.)


	4. Chapter 4

It's early in the evening shift, and you're not even done reviewing the noon's reports when you get the night's first call.

It's Visegrip, and she looks hilariously nervous.

"Kalhil," she says with no preambles, "put on your best uniform. Your best everything. Your crew too. Anyone who could be caught in the comm view. Just… you're getting a call today and you need to be your absolute best to receive it."

You look back at your crew. They all look pretty good to you, clean, uniforms pressed, some not quite fully buttoned, but easy to fix. They are usually even more casual than this; early evening is just more likely to get snooty calls than saner hours. 

Visegrip is a pretty trusted ally, so a few of them are already buttoning collars up and finger-combing fringes no questions asked by the time you turn back to the screen.

"It ain't like you to be so discombobulated," you comment. "I'll put on my mirthful best if you say so. Are you allowed to let slip a name?"

"It's the _Spiceler_ ," she says, and then she stops and looks past the screen like she just got done hearing the word that came out of her mouth, and can't believe she just heard it.

Behind you, the shuffling stops dead, and the air nigh on pops with electrified anxiety.

As usual you feel a whole lot of nothing with a hint of a big crash to come. The Spiceler is going to contact you, and it ain't quite sinking in yet, but that only means you gotta act on it while the acting is good.

"Is he scary?" asks Zaphir and, oh shit, shit shit shit.

You take a deep breath and remind yourself that if you freak out then she'll freak out even harder. "Um," you say, mind zapping around wildly— Pascal can't help, he's upending your wardrobifier so you can be here and not panic in front of your protegé— "well, he's… a big deal."

"He's the oldest troll alive," Visegrip helpfully informs. "After Her Imperious Condescension, of course."

"And unlike her he _looks_ it!" Someone quips— probably Galiom, he's a rascal like that— and you blurt out a surprised laugh. Bless this crew, you think, then crouch down to Zaphir's doodling spot (right under the screen, where the camera will look past her).

"He's a big honcho," you tell her. "More like… the biggest honcho. The biggest honcho's biggest honcho."

"He's the only accredited producer of sour-sough," Visegrip adds from her screen, "and Her Imperious Condescension's exclusive provider."

"What's that?" Zaphir asks. "Sour-suff?"

"It's this thing you put on food," you say, awkwardly. "It's super expensive and Her Condescension loves it. They say she sprinkles it on her every meal, like, and she puts more of it than she does even gold leaf."

"It's really, really sour," adds Engisnër, making a face. Of course she's tasted it, she's the crew's biggest foodie. "A tea-bag's worth costs a fortune even most highbloods can't casually afford. Some seadwellers swear by it, but…"

She makes another face. Sour-sough is _famously_ nasty, and famously consumed by dumb seadwelling chumps just out of its supposed predilection by the Condesce. They all insist on its utter deliciousness, and a few of them even feel sincere in their claims. Whether or not the Condesce actually ate the thing, she certainly hoarded its already very low bi-sweeply harvest, and only part of it was resold— according to unofficial calculations, over half of it has to be stored (and possibly consumed) in the Battleship Condescension itself. 

"Anyway it's very, very hard to grow," you explain, "and it only grows in this one death world. The herb is so finicky it's gotta be planted when the sun is slanted this way so its leaves will grow when the sun is that way, and the flavor changes like this and that if you plant it this high or this low or this early or this late—"

"Like tea?" Zaphir asks (Engisnër has introduced her to tea).

"Way worse," you tell her. "And it needs like a billion slaves to maintain, with gas masks and shit. It's a big fuckin' operation and the Spiceler has been in charge of it since like, the Exile."

Zaphir finally looks impressed. "That's _way_ old," she comments.

"Yeeeeah," you nod back, then stand back up; Pascal reaches a captchalogue card over your shoulder on his way to distributing everyone else's dress duds. "So if you stay real quiet and stealthy, that'll be really helpful for everyone. We all gotta look like tough cookies now, and also like we don't got a kid onboard."

She nods, gathers up her papers and crayons and crawls further away under Galiom's station. You equip the new outfit; you don't know what it looks like, but Visegrip nods approval, and that and your explanation to Zaphir seem to have reoriented your brain.

"Good luck," she says. "My sources insisted you were on his evening contact list for tonight, so be prepared for him to reach out at any moment."

She was still halfway through that sentence when Galiom pointed at his screen and turned to you with a wide-eyed grimace. You just nod to Visegrip, and signals to cut the line; immediately it's replaced by two trolls and.

Well.

By the single most shriveled prune you've ever seen.

No, you're kicking back some massive injustice there, you chide yourself. But the Spiceler does show his age, wears it— not proudly, you think, but without shame. There's no hiding it anyway.

His hair is the purest white you've ever seen, looks soft as a cotton ball, brushed on top and tufty behind his ears, and you tamp down the urge to pet the screen. His horns waver upwards, lose themselves beyond the camera's field of view. His fins are long and tatty, near translucent, loose in their cartilage spurs, and the skin of his neck sags under his chin like the lower beak ornament of a cocklebeast. Not as long, though; you can tell he was never fat, but was once fit, and as his fitness deserted him it left its wrappings behind.

He's wearing a heavy-looking cuirass, only _slightly_ ornamental. Clearly something else his fitness left behind, and which he has not deigned to extirpate from his body either.

By comparison the two other trolls by his throne look even younger than they are like to be. To his left is a secretancillary, indigo, tall and snotty as they do, and to his right is a rustie retainer. They're both dressed to the nines— even the retainer, who from the bottom of his gutterbloodedness manages to make you feel drab to your very soul. Not because you've got less finery on, Pascal chose well, whatever he dressed you in; but to you it's only clothes, covering and costume, and that rustblood stands, looks and breathes like he never once in his entire life doubted his _right_ to wear a fitted tuxedo in silk and gold filigree, not a single inch and not a single ounce of it.

Obeisance is easy, so is fear, but real respect and real pride are shit a troll's gotta sweat and bleed and cry for to earn, and you see them writ on these two trolls and knows why the Spiceler is so admired and feared; for millennia he's cultivated his trolls as you have tried to cultivate yours. And so when you bow to him, you too hold more respect than you do fear.

The Spiceler raises— from the elbow down, as the cuirass remains very firmly still— an spectacularly pruney hand in a vague approximation of a gesture. "Greetings be upon this collection of timber," he says, in this sort-of wheezy, sort-of mumbly way.

The secretancillary at his left coughs into a fist. "Your Excellency," he says, smoothly. "That is the greeting for the Old and High Order of Munificent Cabin Spelunkers."

"Oh," he sounds momentarily confused. "Eh," he says again, perking up slightly. "Oh, that's right, they were first this evening," he chuckles softly, flaps his hand with slightly more vivacity than before. "Well let's try this again, shall we, sonny?"

You're still reeling at being called sonny by another troll when the Spiceler raises another feeble hand and, after some uncertainty, tangles his fingers in some complex configuration that does not seem physically achievable.

"Time and war may wear the rough stone," he intones, waveringly, "but the true jewels—"

He pauses, glances away, licks a wrinkly lip in deep thought.

"Your Excellency," says the retainer at his right, calm and confident. "That is the secret password for the restricted meetings of the Ancient and Most Respectable Society of the Hallowed Defenders of the Hemochromatic Order."

The ancient troll throws his head back in mirth, disentangles his hands in clear relief. "Oh, balls!" he says, looking entirely too amused. "I've been trying to remember that one all day, for the soiree next night. Had it in my head, I guess. I have it, I have it though," he raises a quelling hand to his perfectly silent and still aides. "Hm, let me see, how did it start."

He cups his hands together and slowly raises them as high as his shoulderpads allow, which isn't much.

"May we raise our goblets to imperial glory eternal," he says, a bit too casually.

"Your excellency," his secretancillary interjects, "that is the parting incantation for Grand Overseer-level tasting ceremonies of the New and Improved Organization of the Honorable Guardians of the True and Unsullied Tradition of the First Generation Vintners of Western Upglob."

"Pah, that crowd!" his wrinkles reconfigure themselves into a truly frightening display of disdain. "God, why am I even thinking of them, I thought I passed on my Berry Shoes like a week ago."

"Two weeks, your excellency," his retainer gently corrects.

"And good riddance," the Spiceler adds, then shifts a bit on his throne. You detect it mostly through the movement of his bird-like neck and of the folds in his rather loose layers of clothing; the cuirass stays in place. It's possibly the only thing holding his visibly curved spine in an upright position.

Your crew, bless them, is as confused by this whole thing as you are, even as they concentrate extra hard on their duties. The Spiceler was the subject of a great many rumors, but none of them ever mentioned the fact that he's a kinda funny old dude with a bad memory.

His greatest claim to fame has always been his ongoing and quite flagrant failure at being culled. Not by the Condesce, not by any ambitious upcomer. For all his clout as the only sour-sough producer, few envy him his responsibilities. He's been a golden-table guest in imperial banquets for longer than most generals have been alive, and, some say, is known for wagging his finger at the Condesce with flagrant impunity. 

Looking at him you totally believe it. The Condesce _is_ said to have a sense of humor, after all. Just kind of a mercurial one. 

"Greetings be upon this— oh wait," the Spiceler is saying. "Um. God, I've accumulated way too many affiliations," he grumbles, awkwardly raises his hand like he wants to rake his fingers through his hair, drops it back onto his armrest in defeat. His retainer immediately whips a golden comb out of his sleeve or something and begins gently fluffing the Spiceler's already quite fluffy side tufts. "Thanks, child," he tells the youth under his breath, and focuses back onto you. "I'm getting way too old for formalities and pleasantries. Let's try this a different way, shall we? Hello, Lord Wrathtor," he says, nodding. "I have heard much and more about you, all of it quite good! Quite good indeed."

It's not the done thing, the traditional landdweller-seadweller rivalry being what it is, but you throw all that outta the airlock and bow down again. "Your regard alone is high praise, Excellency," you say. You don't actually know that for sure, but you think he's a cool guy anyway. 

"So well spoken!" the Spiceler smiles up at his secretancillary before turning back to you. "Yes, and I've also been following your threads very closely, such wonderful work." He pauses, apparently catching on to your panicked confusion. "I believe I forgot to inform you I'm acting in my capacity as the Supreme Grand Master of the Horticutterist's Society's Cadre of Masters," he adds, a bit sheepishly. "Now sonny, do you mind emptying the block for a bit of secret Supreme Grand Master talk? Now don't worry, I've assigned a fleet of thirty ships to escort you for the duration, and it shouldn't take too long if you want to turn your shield on as well, keeps the crew calm, I won't take offense. Maybe give these other children a tea break, there's a good lad, hmm?"


	5. Chapter 5

The Spiceler doesn't _have_ to know that Pascal has a direct connection to your pan, or that he and the rest of the bridge crew are all crowded on the other side of the door. He most certainly does _not_ need to know that Zaphir stayed behind. (There really was no way for her to make it to the door unseen. She did the smart thing and didn't even try.)

So you make sure your face is its usual bland blank and stand alone in front of the comm screen, surrounded by empty chairs and idling systems. Your shields are set to maximum, not that it would do any good were thirty much superior ships to hit you simultaneously, but you only _half_ expect this to come to pass; for all you somehow caught his eye, socially speaking you're very much a middle-man and a hanger-on, and you haven't stepped on any toes that you know of.

You can't fully discard the possibility that the Spiceler would spend this kind of time, personnel and weaponry on evaporating a nobody from the universe, but it _is_ very much a ridiculous, unnecessary waste. You're not aware of so much as another troll he would be making a point _to._

"Thanks for humoring this old troll," the Spiceler says; Pascal confirms for you that he _does_ seem more focused and serious than before. "I'm actually here to make a request of you, and I _assure_ you it's quite a simple request, but outlining it will require context of a somewhat secretive persuasion. I did not live this long and make it this far by being careless with such matters, you understand."

You nod.

"Very well. A troll must admit when he's fighting a losing battle, and time was ever my enemy. I am not long for this universe, my child. And I will not have my work turn to ashes in my absence. I am preparing for my demise."

There's really no appropriate response for such an announcement other than to take a shocked step back and sputter incoherently. The Spiceler... by god, yes, he's ever been ancient, but to think!...

He laughs softly at you. "Ah, little one! I assure you, I fully intend to stick around until my body falls apart. I have no reason whatsoever for this stubbornness, other than once being told that no true troll ever died of age. But even while I wait out to be the first, I still must attend to my obligations. And that does include getting rid of them, _properly._ "

His eyelids droop heavily, and he sighs, slow but shallow; you wonder if his lungs aren't filling, or if his ribs aren't stretching, or if the cuirass is choking him.

"I have been passing on my seats in many organizations, formal and informal. As you can imagine it's unheard of for a troll to earn a position in such societies by anything other than the death of a previous member, and who will challenge me to a duel? To kill me by skillful scheming would be an achievement, but an anonymous one by its nature, and to strike me down physically would be nothing but an embarrassment. There's a lesson for you, my lad— after a certain age, you become impervious to a very specific subset of assassination attempts."

"Your Excellency..." you say dumbly.

"Yes?" he asks, unexpectedly. It's just your luck that you _do_ have a question to ask.

"A-am I to understand—" you begin, stuttering embarrassingly, "from your allusion to passing on your seats, and from your contact as a member of the Horticutter's— that you intend me to take your seat among—"

"Oh?" he exclaims, and then flaps his hand hurriedly. "Oh, no, no, god no, whew—" you can't quite hide the huge gusty breath of relief you let out— "you're too young for that kind of bore yet, trust me, you're not missing anything. If someone invites you and you're less than at least eight centuries old don't accept it, it's not worth it, by god do I wish I'd known that before. The kind of petty bullshit that passes for an agenda in those meetings is fit to—"

The Secretancillary coughs, and the Spiceler flaps his feeble hand hurriedly.

"—but I won't bore you with _that_. No, I contacted you for your skill in gardening." You do a quick, awkward bow, which he swiftly dismisses in favor of continuing. "I've read your reports, yes, and your forum threads on plant disposition, soil preparation and intercrossing, as well as reviews from your evaluators and visitors. Of all likely candidates— and trust me, I've considered _many_ — I find you to be the one to have not only the mix of skills I require, but also the facilities, the mindset, and most importantly," his eyes grow sharp, "the _social position._ "

"I..." you hesitate, "I am not particularly placed—"

"You sell yourself short," he interrupts you, with some irritation. "You're no center of attention, and no fleet leader, and that is just as I require. You have connections at a healthy distance. Acquaintances. You're easily overlooked by those not in the know. Even if these matters change, they are for the time being ideal. I will have you cultivate strains of sour-sough."

You straighten your back. Cultivation. Why you and why sour-sough is still unclear, yes, but at least you know you're not being asked to do one of those things expected of purples that are completely beyond you. You check with Pascal—

Oh, gosh. Pascal is relaying the conversation _verbally_ to the bridge crew. No wonder he's been quiet, words take up all his concentration. You make a note to yourself to figure out something really cool to gift Pascal with, or at least insist he give himself something, that's what funds are for.

The Spiceler is pursing his wrinkled, flabby lips, looking momentarily even more off-putting. "This is the part where I tell you the _real_ secrets," he says, and you nod. Plant secrets are your thing. "You'll understand why I requested such unreasonable measures to ensure our privacy. What do you know of Tarrakia?"

Tarrakia is his plantation world, of course. Its real designation is— well, a bunch of numbers and letters, Pascal would know but he's otherwise occupied— but in time it came to be nicknamed after one of the Spiceler's now basically forgotten infancy names. Its atmosphere is highly toxic, its soil disastrously sterile, and sour-sough is the only thing that grows in the inhospitable environment, at great effort and cost. The absurdly high population of criminal slaves assigned to its fields breathe recycled air from canisters and spend what little downtime they're afforded in crowded domes, and the Spiceler is constantly purchasing more— going so far as to pull condemned traitors right out of cull row— to make up for the high mortality rate. No one minds; being assigned to Tarrakia is essentially indistinguishable from a death sentence. 

You relay these facts, in more positive, palatable terms. The Spiceler sighs.

"A convenient lie," he admits, to your surprise. "Yes, Tarrakia is poisonous, more extensively than the reports claim, but it was not always so. When the planet was approached for annexation— well, the Empress arrived with her vanguard, as always, and for her amusement personally greeted its high-caste inhabitants, wandered its most vaunted streets, tasted its greatest delicacies, patronized its most luxurious establishments. She was quite enchanted with the place, and wished to minimize damage to it during the conquering. But these aliens— perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their impression upon Her Imperious Condescension—   displayed much superior instincts than the riff-raff we usually do battle with, and even something akin to a fighting spirit. Thus she had select members of her retinue infiltrate their highest positions, and corrupt and collude with their more impressionable members, in a long-term bid to take over the planet and initiate its genetic purging before its populace could take notice and cause a mess in some attempt at resistance."

Despite the clear wisdom in that strategy, you still can't help feeling an irrational pang of disbelief, almost a feeling of betrayal. Her Imperious Condescension, taking over a planet through base trickery? But yeah, despite the sudden dumb feelings, it's the smart thing to do. You're surprised you don't just always do it anyway, as an Empire. It would go a long way to minimizing losses, and maybe you could divert troops into doing better things or just having actual vacations. 

You nod your understanding. "The Empress's wisdom surpasses my imagination," you say, feeling a bit fake, but eh.

"So it does," he nods ruefully. "But her agents failed. They were punished, of course, but the damage was done— the aliens rose up in their impotent fury, and constantly damaged themselves in their futile bid to damage us. She called upon the fleet to quell them before it was too late, but they were only further infuriated." His face became grim, its wrinkles cutting deep enough to approach the texture of bark. "They poisoned their own planet. They did it willingly and knowingly, desiring only to not let us have what they could not keep."

His head does not quite fall back, as his back is bent too far forward, but he looks up as if he wished it would. "I was still quite young then," he says. "Only a couple of centuries past Exile. I wasn't even part of the effort at the time, my duties menial enough that command under the Empress was but a distant possibility. I was not popular, you see," he smiled, his seadweller teeth looking disturbingly small and spent, "I didn't jockey for influence or compete for the eyes of my superiors. Instead I lined my block with plants and my tank with algae, and I cared for them with my own hands. And the little shits— they tried to hit me through my hobby constantly!" He cackled. "Broken pots, poison, actual scissors, everyone wanted to see me lose my cool. I see that little smirk, boy! Of course it didn't work. Plants aren't so easily killed— and if you don't know plants, how will you know when one is replaced?"

He settles back from his mirth, returns to his grave disposition. "I had acquired an... unexpected reputation. And so I was approached, because Her Imperious Condescension was in a tempestuous mood. She missed the taste of sour-sough, and after all the effort she had put into preserving that planet, she demanded but _that_ as her due. How could anyone, much less me, deny her such a humble prize?"

"Her staff was in despair, and ready to offer me any means necessary to make the plant grow again. I made some risky and rather bold plans, which involved some risky and rather bold demands, and after a great deal of research, yet to be completed at the time I might add, I was brought to kneel at her glorious presence, on the still wet blood of the much older, much more experienced plantation administraitor who had made the attempt before me. A trump card brought to play much too early."

"She asked me, can you grow the herb or not? And I said, oh, your stellar magnificence, promises are cheap, and words are dust. I will do as you wish or I will die, as is the duty of every troll to ever hatch. And then she bid me go to the Battleship Condescension's Greenery and I said, I will grow it in its own homeworld. Because see— literally no one had thought of _that_ before me!"

Your chin drops a bit. "What, really?" you ask, forgetting your manners and ranks.

"Really!" the old troll claps in delight. "Everyone was trying to grow that stuff in alternian soil under alternian environs, because I guess only lowbloods cared about plants before and no one asked their opinion? Maybe? And there wasn't a Horticutter's Society yet, I had to found it myself, planting things was just too _menial_ before I made it fashionable. Anyway the Empress was mighty impressed with me after that, and I sat by her and explained all the logistics involved and we had a truly lovely evening where she—"

"Your Excellency," the retainer chides softly.

"—oh, gosh, if you let me reminisce we'll be stuck here for _sweeps_ ," he says, cheerfully. "But yeah, I was sent to that little dead world with some jury-rigged vacuum suits, and here's the secret sonny— sour-sough fuckin' _thrives_ in that polluted shithole."

Huh.

"So it's not actually rare?" you ask, probing to see if you're on the right track.

"It is because I make it," the Spiceler snorts. "And I make it so for a damn good reason, which takes us back to that little favor I'm asking of you."

"I'm all of ears," you say.

"Good," he says. "Sour-sough is toxic. It's as deadly as the soil it grows in."

You stare at him in alarm.

"The Empress could eat it by the fistful without issue, and I have seen her do so," he continues. "But your average troll? Some crushed, dried leaves sprinkled on one meal might cause a headache, maybe some embarrassing amount of gas. The same amount in every meal for a week, and the damage approaches the irreversible. It's not impossible to develop resistance to the herb in low quantities, as I did, but after a point I just started telling people I got sick of eating it all the time." He makes a face. "Not worth the diarrhea."

"You want me to develop a clean strain," you state.

"I've been trying to for a long, long time," he says, nodding. "And I want you to continue my research. I will provide you with everything you need to take over where I left off— my notes, my seeds, my saplings, soil, any modifications or additions required on your ship to accommodate the saplings and prevent contamination. And there is one more thing I will provide you with, and you will not like it. It is my personal gardener."

You stiffen. "Your Excellency," you steel yourself to lie through your teeth, "far be it from me to call your judgment into question—"

"Pish-posh," he says. "You can do it all you want, so long as you take him in. He's the other reason why I chose you." His eyes harden, and suddenly you can see how in that collection of loosened skin there was once a cunning, deadly, ferocious predator, daring enough to chit-chat with a furious Empress. "You have not endeavored to conceal your unorthodox leadership methods, and it's clear between the lines of your online presence the philosophy that lies at their root." His eyes gentle. "Not for those in the know, at least. I, too, found that _not_ being an ass was the true secret to loyalty and efficiency. There are not enough of us in the fleet, I'm afraid."

He shakes his head sadly. "My personal gardener is... very, very good at his job, and very, very loyal. But even though I would love nothing more than to say I would trust him with my life, to do so would be unwise. He is _damaged_."

Oh.

"Oh," you say.

"I'm glad you understand," he says. "I have... _cared_ for him, watched his slow, unprecedented recovery with my own two eyes, and I would not have the hard work of my crew—" his hand rests momentarily on his retainer's arm— " _undone_. He will not test your patience overmuch, I believe. Apart from an unfortunate tendency to forget his meals, he is self-sufficient and highly disciplined. He understands all aspects of this research, its importance and secrecy, and I'm sure he'll love to help with your _actual_ garden as well. But one can see it in his eyes." He glances down, mournful. "Most other trolls would not hesitate to put him down."

You bow again, deeply. "I understand entirely," you say. "And have no intentions of breaking your trust in this delicate matter."

"I thank you," he says, nodding back. "And now I have but one more instruction left. In the event of my passing, Tarrakia is sure to pass onto a senior member of the Horticutterist's Society's Cadre of Masters. I have elected to not meddle in that particular succession overmuch, as the masters _have_ proved themselves trustworthy so far. They may choose amongst themselves." He purses his lips again. "But for all they are my friends of a sort, they all have their... vices, and ambitions. And sour-sough does grow ever so easily... which is why, in case of a sudden rise in _productivity_ , I would like you to— discreetly— introduce your strains to the market. Via corsairs, or a foolish rival, a smuggling ring, anything. _As quietly as you can make it._ " His eyes grow intense. "Her Imperious Condescension will not like it, of course, and would never approve of a competitor, so just... throw it out there. Step way back and let the illegal plantations flourish, away from you, your name, your ship. Even if your strain isn't completely clear, less poison is better than full poison, and bootlegs _are_ always cheaper. If you can do that, then..." 

To your surprise, his eyes grow shiny, misty; he wipes a stray tear before it can fall.

"Then," he says, with a wobbly little voice, "I will be able to rest with a conscience less _murky_."

The retainer hovers over him like an anxious lusus, dabbing at his drooping face with a fancy handkerchief; the secretancillary manifests a comb to fuss over his hair, fluffing what his companion had already fluffed before. It should be humorous, but you find it none; only jealous scum could possibly sneer at this display of devotion.

(Too bad the fleet is comprised entirely of jealous scum, you think, or maybe it's Pascal; he's peeking back in to check on your agitation.)

You wait until the aides are done fussing to speak.

"It will be my honor to follow your instructions," you say, and at a prompt from Pascal, "the ship is ready to receive the research and the new personnel at any moment."

The Spiceler nods. "This very night," he says, only a little bit choked still. "One of mine will contact you with the paperwork, a team of certified inner-hull retrofitters, and my gardener. His name is Olvier Antias." He offers you a small smile. "And they will leave with a very secret, very sizable crate of pail-stoker, if anyone asks, which _no one will_ , and you should _totally_ not answer them."

You blurt out a surprised little laugh at that. Pail-stoker is a nasty little herb rumored to improve a troll's _vigor_ in a pinch. Not his slurry amount or anything else, though, just the bit likely to impress a partner. The idea of the shriveled old troll partaking of it is hilariously disturbing, and him or anyone else getting a whole crate of it is downright absurd.

Of course, people would then assume you grew the thing, which, on second thought, would be the perfect cover for the actual operation.

He looks delighted by your laugher, and grins wide back at you. "I suppose this is goodbye, then, Lord Wrathtor," he says, and attempts to touch two points of his cuirass. "Potti-pollah, coffee-chocollah, tug the woof—"

"Your Excellency," says his secretancillary, "that's the parting greeting of the Smuff Club."

"Haha!" he barks out. "Oh, I give, I give. Let's do this the boring way then. Bye, Lord Wrathtor!" He waves, and then, to your horror, he turns his palm to wave at somewhere behind you. "Bye!"

The screen goes blank and you turn around, to see Zaphir crouched behind Engisnër's chair— where Engisnër's legs will usually hide her, but where, with the adult absent, she's perfectly visible to anyone who's not completely tunnel-focused on you.

She's waving back to the screen, wide-eyed, her other hand clutching a half-chewed crayon. "His hair looks like _cotton-candy_ ," she whispers to you, in complete fascination. 

The crew bursts back into the bridge— the active ones and possibly half the downtime ones— to both chide her and make really noisy plans around you.


	6. Chapter 6

A stealth conveyance module arrives later that night, long after the Spiceler and his thirty ships had vacated your route, floating nearly invisible within transportalizing range. They send in a fairly friendly crew which immediately initiates a deep and complex conversation with Engisnër and the maintenance sergeant, leaning over maps and calculations and stuff; and they also send in Olvier Antias.

He is damaged. Oh, he's ambulatory with no visible difficulties and well if slow-spoken. But it's in his eyes, vague and meandering, in his floaty hands, his faint and somewhat puzzled open-mouthed smile. It's the smile of someone who was punished for not smiling enough, in a manner they could not possibly forget.

Olvier is olive. Were he bluer, his weirdness might have been tolerated; were he redder, his torturers would not have bothered keeping him alive to be found. As a highblood, he would have been _eccentric_ , and the puppet of a helpful minder.

Why one would break an oliveblood in such a manner is beyond your ability to guess. 

You briefly touch the visitors' minds, as is expected of your pedigree. You don't really linger; just make sure they are what they seem. Olvier's is exactly as disturbing to visit as you expect it to be— he turns his attention to your mental presence, like a blind animal tracking a light, but doesn't react or flinch or acknowledge you in any other way. Outwardly, his distant gaze flickers here and there without seeming to take in anything.

The retrofitter crew is okay.

You join the conversation around the modding they'll be doing, show them around the garden and a couple of other areas of interest. The contamination concern the Spiceler had alluded to turned out to not be pollen or heat or atmosphere, but actual seeping of toxicity, and the crew is here to make sure the laboratormentory— which is what this all is turning out to be— is not only completely concealed from the ship's habitable parts but also isolated and, in case of emergency, actually _ejectable_. 

"It'll be okay," Olvier says floatily, the first thing he's spoken since greeting you on arrival. "Within a few generations, we should be able to discard the starter soil, and work with a much more stable sample. Contamination will not be as dangerous then."

You don't really have much of a use for your brig, so it's decided eventually that you'll be sharply diminishing it for the hidden block. The workers have you vacate the area, and after outfitting some of your own maintenance crew with vacuum armor, they seal all the corridors and air ducts and get to some truly frightening work. You hover around the area uselessly, flitting through your workers' minds to make sure nothing untoward is happening, until you get a notice that Zaphir slipped out of your block.

"All of this is doing a number on my chill," you complain sotto-voice to Solace on your way past the other hanger-ons.

You catch up to Zaphir trying to climb _into_ an air duct, to your horror. You blow a raspberry on her tummy for the scare, and do your best to explain what's causing all the noise. And no, she can't go look, even if the Spiceler has seen her, these workers don't need to.

"You can talk to the new gardener when they're gone," you tell her as consolation. "And I bet Talcha is taking some bitchin' footage we can all be watching later."

She grudgingly relents, and you go on to fret at the kitchens in the company of entirely too much dessert. Pascal joins you in overwhelmed defeat, and you share with him the taste of the things that upset his food sac.

#

The entire thing takes nearly over a night cycle, much longer than you ever put any member of your crew to work, and you'd be furious with the retrofitters if they hadn't worked just as long. Their work is— exquisite, is the word what comes to mind. The brig was modded to look all dank and scary and shit, and some sort of texture work gives it the illusion of being bigger than it actually is; the entrance to the laboratormentory proper is several floors up right in your garden, in a set of fancy hemochrome-gradated load gaper stalls they built just for that; it's behind a narrow, sad little crooked rustblood-assigned door with a nasty-looking mop propped in just inside. The load gaper is sealed with a grubby-looking anti-spill lid, the universal sign for "this been broken forever and won't be fixed". The lid is actually a state-of-the-art transportalizer.

Inside, the laboratormentory is stark bright; it has its own atmosphere generator and _five_ backups, and its own set of automated air ducts what lead out into space, for the sake of expelling sudden fumes. It's very much not a place for fucking around in, and so you make sure to lock the transportalizer to all but the few what's got business inside.

After happily accepting some tea, the retrofitters go back to their stealth module, and are very soon replaced by a not _quite_ as stealthy module, which actually docks with your ship. A young teal (who's clearly having the time of her life) plays the role of snotty-arrogant envoy who only barely steps past the airlock, announces the delivery of your "payment" courtesy of "my esteemed employer", imperiously orders her smirking workers to pile some crates inside, hams it up massively, quotes a movie and then leaves, immediately becoming a memetic heroine among your crew.

You open the surprisingly small crates in the laboratory, with Olvier and Pascal, and they're packed tight with high-security captchalogue cards. They're not marked in any particular way, but Olvier neatly sorts through and stacks them in piles like he knows exactly what is what.

He unlocks a set and pushes the stack toward you. "These are your reward," he says, to your surprise, and you decaptchalogue a couple to find a veritable largesse of alternian soil, saplings and seeds, labeled by source and age.

You hurry to get those out of the lab, and return to find the two poring through reams and reams of paper, every surface piled with centuries of science.

The research is _wild_. It has its own glossary of terms made up specifically to describe the crazy, esoteric stuff they dug out of it. You can tell there's lethalchemy up the ass in this bitch, and summon your lethalchemist to join the effort; even then, the thing is so opaque that you do something you haven't been forced to do in sweeps, and open channels directly into your party's brains (even in Olvier's, who is extremely blasé about it).

With you serving as a hub for three very brainy trolls, and with Olvier providing near subconscious context, you finally manage to compile the knowledge you're supposed to start with.

Sour-sough, by itself, isn't actually toxic; it absorbs poison from Tarrakia's soil and air. It did not originally do so, according to unburied samples of dead specimens, but was modified by the aliens for— if you understood it properly, and from Olvier's mind it seems to be the case— the eventual long-term recovery of the planet.

They somehow modified the plant to serve as a filter, in sum. It sucks in poison from the ground, does some chemical magic in its stem, breathes it out through its leaves slightly changed, and then when it shrivels and dies its rotting remains do more chemical magic to make the place slightly less poisonous than before. It's slow-going, and no alien could possibly survive long enough to reap the benefits of an eventually clean world. On the other hand, the fact that the herb spreads like the worst kind of weed and will grow straight onto rocks does bring a planetary recovery to the realms of feasibility. 

It's also incredibly fucking addictive, and the only thing keeping most trolls from dying of excess seasoning is the god-awful taste of the poison, which completely obscures its original flavor. 

The research questions whether they intended to leave behind an undetectable poison trap for trollkind, and failed to disguise its taste. This goes on and on and on in the text, even as they map leaf areas, extract substances, compare the results of crossings and compiles lists of new strains. If they wanted to kill trolls by spice overdose, how could they fail to make the spice actually _palatable_?

According to Olvier, the answer to that question lies on a different, unrelated bit of research the Spiceler's team found itself conducting, also quite secretly; the dissertation is brought out, with more new science, more glossary, and the mapped cutouts of many troll heads and tongues.

Due to a genetic aberration, a _very_ small percentage of seadwellers lacks a _very_ specific cluster of taste buds. The Condesce… the Condesce is one of them. The aliens created their poison using the Condesce as a test subject, possibly during her tour of their delicacies, possibly from the very start, not knowing that— 

Your lethalchemist is connected directly to your pan, but she still feels the need to voice the heretical thought. "Holy shit," she mumbles. "The Condesce is a mutant."

For obvious reasons, the dissertation in question has one single extant copy, and it's the one in your hands. Once read, you have Olvier lock it back in its original captchalogue card, and you hide it in one of the laboratormentory's anti-contaminant lockers. 

Olvier remains utterly serene while you recover from that particular bomb, and occupies himself by setting up the samples. Thankfully you won't have to do the actual hard, secretly-invented science stuff; the several strains you were given are fairly along in the process, the addictive substance (a replacement for naturally-produced soothing chemicals) nearly nullified. There's even a suggestion on the research to maintain a trace of it in one distinctive strain, to medicate trolls recovering from battle or torture. It's a pretty cool idea.

The issue that remains, however, is the fact that it won't grow anywhere but in its original soil.

You've got a surface soil sample, a _very deep_ under the surface soil sample, a surface soil sample after sweeps of composting dead sour-sough leaves on it, and another underground sample with the same treatment. Predictably the latter has displayed the best results, but it's still too deadly for safe cultivation.

Your challenge is to mix up a toxin-free soil sample that will grow the new strains. In the meantime, your group plants your material in a sealed tube connected to one of the other atmosphere generators _and_ a toxin detector, and Olvier sets a row of gas masks on some specially prepared hooks nearby. "In a few hours," he says, softly, smiling, "that air will be pretty deadly, so don't forget to put these on."

And, he adds serenely, the toxin is also really stinky, so leaks are pretty obvious.

You eye the emergency levers— full atmospheric cycling, full atmospheric expelling, module ejection— and make a point of memorizing their location in relation to all other workstations in the block.


	7. Chapter 7

The whole setting up and reading up took the better part of a week, in between your actual duties, and you almost can't believe it when it's over. Poor Zaphir has been pretty neglected, outside of the time she spends in the bridge; when you stumble back in your block after finally, _finally_ finishing the whole thing, you sweep her off your fancy captanial seating apparatus and collapse on it, then set her back on your knee and kind of melt back into the fleshy gooey back support.

"What's been all of up, Zaps," you kind of moan at the ceiling. 

"Memmy is teaching me about stars," she says proudly. You assume from context she either means Navitrix or Engisnër. "What about you?" she asks, very conspicuously lightly.

"I'm beat," you whine. "My thinkpan is turned into cotton candy. It's all Spicehair in here."

"Is it because you had to do all the secrets?" she asks.

"All of them," you say, "and some besides. I hate secrets," you confess. "Unfun ones," you specify. "You're a good secret," you fluff her hair with a limp hand; the face grease is finally all washed out of it, and it's way softer with the combing solution Pascal replaced it with.

"Thanks," she says, leaning back gingerly on your chest armor, and you sit there in companionable silence until your personal comm screen beeps and you jump in startlement and nearly send her flying.

You set her out of view just in case and drag your chair to the screen. It's Visegrip.

"Toledo, _what the fuck_ ," you blurt out as soon as her face comes into view. You didn't mean to; using her name is still weird, and she don't know half of what you've been up to, and you only had the time to write her a terse update on your alive status since her last very helpful call. 

You lower your face in shame and start kind of laughing, very nervously.

"Well, you tell me," she says gamely, and then Zaphir skips up to the screen in joy. You're not sure whether you told her about Visegrip at some point, or if she remembers the big indigo from her own rescue, or if a crew let her know of her role, but the little one treats her like another trusted member of your ship, one that just isn't on board most of the time.

"Hey, hey!" Zaphir shouts. "I drew you!" she proclaims.

"Really?" Visegrip gasps. "I'm so honored! Lord Wrathtor," she turns to you, more seriously, as Zaphir bounces off to her mostly neat pile of drawings, "…Kalhil. How classified was your dealing with the Spiceler?"

"Super," you answer straightaway, but after a moment's thought you add, "though I personally would trust you some with it. It's garden stuff," you say, "Right up your alley, I got the reckoning."

"But not safe for a long-distance call, I presume?" she asks. You shake your head. It really isn't.

"Here!" Zaphir plasters a sheet of paper to the screen, uselessly as the camera is actually a little hole above it, "what do you think?"

You coax the paper out of her hands, tug her a little ways back where Visegrip (and you) can actually see it. The head is a rectangle, the body a bigger, wider rectangle; the whole thing sort of lists precariously to one side. There are flowers floating inexplicably. The eyes are a concerted attempt at realistic, surrounded by more lashes than a flagellate protozoa. The horns don't really correspond to anyone's you know about.

"It's beautiful," Visegrip says, eyes aglow with sincerity.

Zaphir pretty nearly glows herself. "It's yours!" she says, breathlessly. "I'm giving it! To you! I'mma sendificate it, with the sendificate-or," she turns around herself in an excited little dance, searching for your personal sendificator.

You keep your sendificator turned off for the obvious reason of Zaphir's enthusiasm, but even assuming she figured it out, most ships only have one sendificating-enabled block— somewhere where a rigged explosive not automatically detected won't damage anything important. It's usually wherever lowbloods congregate, and you don't think Visegrip would appreciate her wonky visage being publicly displayed to people who might not know or like her. 

But Visegrip resolves the issue right as you resolve to sweep Zaphir off her feet.

"Hold onto it," she says, gently. "I'll pick it up myself."

" _Really?_ " Zaphir gasps, with great exaggeration.

"Really," Visegrip repeats. "I will be paying a visit soon. Lord Wrathtor," she turns to you while Zaphir squeaks and screeches, "let me know when a visit is most convenient."

"Pascal will contact you shortly," you pompous right back at her, gravely making believe Zaphir isn't shaking your arm up and down while jumping. "Oh," you say, before she cuts the call off, "he did foist a gardener on me." 

Anyone who sees your garden will see him anyway, so you're not really treating it as a big secret. Visegrip makes a face in sympathy; you nod ruefully. 

"That's right!" Zaphir says, thoughtfully, interrupting her jumping routine and pinching her chin in deep pondering. "I haven't been to see him yet."

"You can go," you say, somewhat overeager to give yourself a reprieve. "He seems a good sort— but a little damaged, be nice!" You call after her as she bounces off on out of the block.

"Damaged?" Visegrip asks, interested.

"Torture, prolly," you say, sinking back into your chair. "He's only half here. I think the plants… give him roots, like."

"Oh," she says, in a manner that sounds pretty familiar to you.

"Yeah, oh," you sigh, and after that the conversation peters into rote social noise. Anything worth saying must be said in person, anyway.

#

In person happens soon enough, at least, and Visegrip is greeted with great fanfare and much jumping by Zaphir.

"Welcome," you tell her, while Zaphir waves her by now rather abused portrait in the vicinity of Visegrip's waist. "The kitchens set a tea table on the garden, it looks pretty good."

"Lovely," she tells her crumply portrait, carefully nestling it into a manila folder to Zaphir's delight. "And oh, that sounds nice. Your cooks are so good, and your tea— I hear you're now the favored providers for Prince Bluglade Stormrip's luncheons, too."

"I think so, yeah," you say, vaguely wondering who the hell that even was.

"Yes you are," she says more firmly, walking on ahead of you. (Pascal confirms.) "I'm not just here to hear about your new gardener, you know— I've some stuff of my own to put on the table, some of it I dug up these past days." She slows her pace, allows you to overtake her— slightly ahead as is hemocastely proper, with Zaphir hanging from her arm in a manner highly improper. "Some of it I've been sitting on a while," she adds, lower, cahoots-like. 

"Ain't no matter," you mutter back. Sometimes one keeps shit close to the chest for safety, but then putting it out there becomes less a danger and more a hassle. You've done it yourself a fair share.

"I appreciate your understanding," she says, and you think she means it.

Your garden has sure come a long way since you first introduced it to Visegrip's discerning gaze. It's a proper garden-like garden, now, rather than a collection of sparsely arranged dirt receptacles with plants in. The bushes are bushy, the flowers are flowery, and the trees give wide dappled shade in the daylight cycle; the three amethyst geode fountains tinkle-clink under the soft brushing of foliage under circulating air. It's colorful, bright in spots, relaxing dark in others, and a big genuine alternian cherry tree now towers over the far side, courtesy of the Spiceler. 

Your rhododendron is huge, glistening and magnificent, three times repotted due to growth, and surrounded by lounging platforms. Fakiya softly snores on one of them, and a few seats away Olvier sits on another, light as a feather, with an analog clipboard in hand. 

Zaphir immediately skips off to badger him, and he directs his vague smile at her. (You watch him and for a second could swear the air cycle was about to take him floating off.)

"Hm," Visegrip hums softly as she studies the lad.

"The Spiceler says he picked me for his sake," you say, tiredly, pulling out a chair to sit on. (Commissioned from one of the cleaning crew, who apparently used to weave novelty straw furniture at a blueblood sweatshop.)

Visegrip pulls her chair as well, looks at it in surprise (you commissioned a whole set plus table), and then sits on it gingerly, surprised that it held her weight. (You suggested the maker make it a sidething proper, but the kid was understandably hesitant. A sweatshop sours any good hobby.)

"Pretty cool, right?" you say.

"Yes—," she says, still looking surprised, but then shakes her head. "But what's this about picking you for him, then?"

"Is what I said." You pick one of the little tea cakes. It's a bit crumbly. Lovingly decorated. You take a good long look at it. "But maybe for the crew too."

You pop the cake in your mouth, sip the tea. It's fruity and sweet.

"So is your job to keep him out of harm's way?" she asks, after sipping some as well.

"If it is, it's unspoken," you say, brushing the crumbs off your hands, "but I'd do it anyway. No, there's a very serious gardening project underway, and the kid knows it upside-down." You shift uncomfortably in your chair. "But not everyone can stand a servant what stares through you while smiling and looks to not be living in this here reality, I got the reckon. I'm not sure how he figured I'd choose patience over mercy-culling, or just respect his expertise if that was the concern, over any of my horticutterist's seniors," you confess, a little niggling question that's been wiggling around the back of your mind but which you hadn't yet put to words.

"I…" Visegrip hesitates. "I think I have the answer to this question, Lord. That is to say, the topic I intended to go into in this visit— I believe it may be related to… the Spiceler's sudden… contact."

"Well, shit," you settle back on your chair, considerably heartened; Visegrip knows her stuff, and if she's been sitting on it and decided to speak now, it's gotta be good (for a given value). "Bring it!"

She for sure looks like she knows not where to start. She glances around, at your tea, at Zaphir and Olvier; whatever she sees steels her resolve enough, at least, and she sets both hands on the table, looks at them intently.

"Among the Horticutterists," she says, "there is what you could call… a sub-group. A sub-society. It encompasses members from other orders and clubs as well, regardless of rivalries or incompatibilities. It has no name, and is invite-only— and any troll of any caste can be invited, even though only the richest among them can partake of this group's main and most important activity."

You nod coaxingly, curious; her hands are now closing on the tabletop, not in anger but in nervousness, and she does finally say…

"They— are sworn to purchase any corsair-peddled child."

You.

You kinda got nothing.

"My duty among them is— to learn from my… pirate contacts whether the homeworld has been looted, and… whether a child was part of the loot. From there, other members would contact the group in question, posing as…"

"Pedos?" you blurt out.

"Yes," she nods blankly. "And make offers. And in case the child has been purchased by an outsider, to… obtain information on the buyer."

"And?" 

"Kill the shit out of them," she spits out, like letting escape a long-held breath. "And recover the child, if possible."

"So…" you ask, slowly, probing, not sure what your feels are about yet, "you knew about Zaphir all along?"

"No!" she screams, smacks the table hard enough to make all the crockery leap; then she sets her elbows on it and buries her head in her hands. "I mean, yes, I knew there was a looted kid. But she wasn't supposed to— the Rim Market wasn't— I mentioned this, I think." She takes a deep breath, knits her fingers under her nose, controls her temper. "The main faction had shared our cause for many sweeps. They would never allow a child to be peddled so brazenly. In terms of my job as part of the Counter-Corsairs, her presence there tipped us into some very, _very_ serious background going ons among the most powerful piratical factions, and may well be called a god-send. We were able to run damage-control in time, we're on top of things. But I'd never…" she shakes her head, settles back on her chair with a pained look. "By god, I'd never take you there. Hell, if I'd learned of it two hours before the auction, I'd make up an excuse, I'd straight up lie to you, but I'd never let you there."

You still don't know what your feels are about, but you don't much like where they're going. "So you—" you brush your hair back, you think you're getting kind of agitated— "you'd let some… pervert… buy Zaps so as to spare me? Really though? I ain't no kid myself, I—"

Visegrip shakes her head at you, softly. Leans over the table, pats your hand with her heavy, hard one. "Kalhil," she says. "Eudora Kalhil, if you hadn't bought her, someone else would have— among the Horticutterist's. Remember? We are many in the Society. There's always one of us in the auctions, buying some soil, some leaves. She would have been bought, no matter the price, because— in the Society, everyone contributes to reimbursements. That— _that—_ he had no chance, I swear to you."

"Then…" you pull your hand away from hers, flop back on the chair. "Then… I could have not bought her and she'd be fine, is that it? What you were sitting on that you were meaning to get your tell at me?"

"Yes," she says, calm, guarded.

You blurt out a little laugh. Brush your hair back. You're not feeling much mirth, you don't like the idea of _not_ having Zaphir here, you don't know you'd trust anyone else with her, but still… you laugh again.

"I guess… I guess I played one mighty fool there, then, sniping her right out of peeps what were trying to save her anyway," you say, feeling a little numb. "And how was a friend to even turn and tell this furious motherfucker, right then and there, that it was fine and to let it be? Right?"

You grin at her helplessly, but the look she's giving you is— it is beyond you, what it could possibly mean. And when she talks, her voice is full of… of pity, not the romantic kind, but the kind when someone is wounded, and you wish to make them… not.

"Kalhil," she says, "how was I to stop you from doing a _good_ thing?" 

And to your distress, a tear suddenly escapes one of her eyes, hurries down to her strong square chin in a perfect little indigo stripe. 

"For all we have good numbers," she says, a little thick in the throat, "none joined from having taken the initiative as you did. We're… scouted, as it is, outside these areas, discreetly, and among prospective members there have been some excruciatingly painful disappointments. So— can you— can you even imagine what it was like, for me, for _us_ , when you stood up and doubled an already thoroughly ridiculous bid?" She sighed, deep and pained, finally wiped her tear away. "When I stood after you, I made a small sign, something that a member would recognize. So they would know— that you were one of us, even without _knowing_ of us."

You… you look down at your hand, resting on your knee. Move a thumb, all while feeling a million miles away.

"Were they," you ask, shyly. "Were they happy, then?"

"What, that you bought Zaphir?" she asks in surprise. "By god, you have no idea! And they pestered me for news, too, all the time. I was basically—" she lets escape a nervous little laugh— " _liveblogging_ your Zaphir liveblog, as it was—"

It's now your turn to let out a sudden, speedy little tear. Pascal rushes in to check on you, on your overwhelmed feelings, and you just let him rummage— how can you even begin to explain?

You always… you always loved it, as a highblood, as a captain, an admiral, when a little junior came out of their shell, filled up their chest, and let the universe know what they were about. When a lowblood lost their fear. 

And now, how are you to react, knowing you were the one to grant a bunch of incredibly rich and old and powerful trolls this _joy_? And more than that, the knowledge that they would take joy in such actions to begin with— 

Visegrip is laughing awkwardly at your display now, even filling your teacup for you, and you just shake your head, at a loss. 

"Well," she says, most as an offer of noise, "I am not _quite_ done, if you will, with my information exchange—"

You wave a hand at her in a wordless offer of attention; you'll give as much as you're capable of, right now, and so will Pascal, now plenty engrossed.

"As I mentioned, the members of our secret order… we support each other, most of all after a heavy purchase," she laughs awkwardly. "And so they chose to support you, even you not being an official member, you know. If you ever wondered about all the clientele you suddenly got out of nowhere."

The laugh that bursts out of you is way more of the mirthful type now. "Well now, damn if _that_ mystery didn't get all of solved!" You bellow, in sudden high spirits. "And here I just thought our tea was that good. Don't tell Engisnër, it'll break her little pump-cookie!"

"To be fair," she says, grinning along with you, "they all praise your tea to the moons and back. I daresay your tea really _is_ that good." Her smile fades a little bit. "And I suppose you figured out, now, how the Spiceler came to take notice of you."

You actually hadn't, not until she said it. "He founded your club," you blurt out, in a flustered hush.

"That I don't know," she says. "And I didn't know this either, but he funds nearly all our operations. And also," she glances to the side, "he manages another operation, even more secret. A no-culling rehabilitation effort. In his own personal ship."

You'd probably just sit there and stare at her blankly, but Pascal— Pascal who's always been way more on the ball than you ever have— takes charge of your eyes and all but cricks your neck in his hurry to follow her glance.

You both look at Olvier, chatting with Zaphir, and he gets it way before you do.

"Oh, _god,_ " he moans with your mouth, and buries your face on your hands, and then you get it and are glad that he already did, because.

Oh.

_Oh god._

"Yes," Visegrip's voice is subdued. You hear her sip from her cup, set it down with a muted little clink. "And… that's another reason why your efforts have garnered such attention. You had no experience, but were still so wildly successful, you know?" You glance up at her rueful little smile. "I was on pins and needles waiting for the moment I'd have to step in, explain all of this stuff, offer to have her removed to a more experienced member. But you didn't need it at all. And then I had no idea how to breach the topic, until it turned out that the Spiceler was up to the horns in our little effort, and really impressed by you."

"Well, that…" you don't know what to say at first, but then Pascal realizes a thing, and you speak now with a lot more feeling. "That's a relief, because he saw Zaphir hiding under the chairs and even waved at her, and I had like no idea what he'd make of a stray kid in my brig."

"I'm sure he was utterly charmed," she says, amused.

"Her mouth was full of crayon," you half-laugh out.

"I am given to understand that this is a very common state for a healthy pupa's mouth to be in," she tells you, in playful comfort. "I have even been assured of having done it myself, despite having no recollection nor witnesses to it. Pupas chew things!"

"Oh, dang," you say, "he probably thought, oh sure that there's the one pupa, and it's fuckin' eating a crayon like every other pupa I've ever set my old-ass eyes on, that it is!"

You both laugh a little bit, in that weak but heartfelt little way of tension being released. But the mind inexorably turns to darker things, or maybe that's just Pascal, who's a pessimistic sort.

Your conversation goes on, more subdued, over the now mostly cooled pastries. Not all pupas are removed from their unfortunate situations fast enough, you're told. Those that are _do_ recover given some care and time— sooner if given the kind of specialized treatment long put together by the Spiceler in his personal facilities with his specially trained personnel— but of those that aren't…

Not all… _buyers_ take proper care of their properties. Some do treat them as the valuable— _investment_ — that they are, and of those, a few might be reached, coaxed out of whatever dark cranny of their minds they retreated to, made to relearn their existence as trolls. 

(Visegrip theorizes that Olvier may have been one of these lucky investments, his caste-appropriate height and lack of apparent scars a testament to some quality upkeep. You don't like that one bit, and Pascal even less.)

The careless owners, though. The ones who forget that trolls need eating, and that their toy-troll needs to be _told_ to eat— and to have their food put in their mouth, and that they were mind-fucked out of biting and chewing besides. The ones who forget that such food as their little victims do eat will inevitably make its way to the other side of their bodies. The petty, stupid ones who get angry over a fucktoy that's too starved to do its service, or that soiled what shouldn't have been soiled, or that drooled in an unsightly manner.

Those kids can but be mercy-culled. And their owners, culled with no mercy.

(Visegrip describes how one such careless owner was served, at the behest of his assigned captor, the same sickening wounds visited upon his little victim. Breaking the bones of his hands and tying them together into fusing the wrong way was but _part_ of it.)

After such gruesome parlance, at least, Visegrip offers a sliver of hope: pirates fucking sucked at kidnapping kids, for the most part. They had to run the homeworld's Orbital Offense, which had firepower to blow moon-sized meteors straight out of the sky, run a gauntlet of angry drones pulled out of whatever they'd been doing and given priority orders to destroy literally everything in a wide radius from the invading element, hope they landed somewhere inhabited to begin with, hope they could find a kid before said angry drones found all of them first, make it back to their drone-swarmed vessel, and then hope the vessel could even take off after all the damage incurred. And then sometimes the vessel made it to space just to fall apart in the vacuum. 

Pirate fleets were in the habit of sending in hundreds of ships homeward at a time, in a synchronized attack, and like, ten of those would make it in, and then maybe two managed takeoff, and very rarely, one of them held together enough to dock into another vessel and offload the goods before abandoning the derelict ship to its inevitable depressurized fate. (What about the battery? You both think in horror, but the answer is as obvious as it is disgusting.)

This also meant that any successful run was cause for much bragging, and any poached goods would be announced far and wide. She was thus perfectly positioned to know which corsairs got what; her anti-slavery pirate pals were in on her side-job and gave her all the news. 

"If you ever do go back to the Rim Market," she says, as you see her off at the transportalizer, "the chances of another child being sold are slim to none, and I am ever thankful for it."

"I don't think we could handle another go at that," you speak, truthfully— for you and for Pascal.

She nods in understand. "Then rest assured that if there ever _is_ a pupa at the auctions, and you're not there, we'll buy them, and save them, however much it costs, and in any way we can." Her eyes are dark cold blue and stone-like. "And we'll dismantle the sellers. Ship by ship."

She leaves; Zaphir waves sadly to her afterimage. She's very subdued, possibly having guessed at the context of your parting words; as you lead her off to your block, she says, mournfully:

"Olvier said I was way tougher than he was," and doesn't speak any further on it, but you can imagine. She's no fool. She knows what it was about. 

You squeeze her hand, hoist her into the recuperacoon, offer her a toy in a poor attempt at comfort. You consider suggesting thumb-wrestling, but you're not feeling it, and she clearly isn't either, as she elects to sink into the slime almost to her nostrils.

You're in the ablution block dealing with your morning hygiene when Pascal lets you know that, after some not quite legal research, he failed to find any registered Olvier Antias in the Exiled Cadet Registry going back several centuries. You are not surprised.

You _are_ a bit surprised to learn that the Antias line has apparently produced trolls all over the hemospectrum, all of them registered post-factum in the fleet, in minor positions— so minor as to not call attention to the fact that their symbols were basically unused and recolored limeblood signs.

And Olvier was the name of a very obscure troll rebel culled sometime before the Exile.


	8. Chapter 8

You know this night is gonna suck when you wake up to the news that Fakiya has lost her battle with age.

You dress up in a daze, scoop up a sobbing Zaphir; by the time you stumble into the garden there's already a small group standing solemnly around her usual napping spot. Olvier stands slightly apart, his vacant smile particularly eerie in its absence. Even your rhododendron looks sad, its maw bowed down into the circle and out of sight. 

The crowd parts for you, and you see that your rhododendron's maw is resting, closed, on Fakiya's forehead.

Fakiya is still— in her chest, in her hands, in the pack of doloritos dropped by her garden bench. Her lips have grown ashen, the lines of her face drooping to the sides. Her forehead is bruising unnaturally under the rhododendron's strange kiss.

"It won't eat her," one of the maintenance cadets whispers to you, her cheeks trailing dark tears.

"Of course not!" Zaphir cries out, wiping her face with both arms. "They were friends. They talked! She told me."

This seems like the kind of news that should surprise you, but you're still too numb, so you just glance around for someone to clarify. A brownie from the cleaning squad steps forward, relays some of Fakiya's outrageous but apparently correct claims— that your rhododendron was close enough to an animal to display rudimentary thought processes, and that she could make enough sense of them for simple communication. 

"It's not quite impossible, Lord," he says, in this flat, stunned tone of voice that feels very familiar right now. "I can tell there's something there, but it's… spread out and weird. Like ants, but _less_. I don't think I could interact with it. I don't think _anyone_ could. But…"

He shrugs an elbow vaguely towards the display. Yeah. Whatever little communication there _was_ was meaningful enough, at least.

You set Zaphir down, approach the body of your friend and kismesis. She looks so— worn, used up, but the set of her features is calm. It sits very naturally in her otherwise still face. Even in death, she doesn't give a shit about anything. 

You are suddenly reminded of the Spiceler. Did she do it? Did she beat him to an untrollish death? But now that the old fishface is floating in your mind, she suddenly looks young, infinitely so, with her proud chin and toned arms and the still healthy-looking skin on her cheeks and shoulders, shed and renewed over and over under gentle heat.

No, you resolve. Whatever killed her was not time. There was more life for her to burn. She was fighting an enemy unseen and unrelenting, and died a troll to the end. 

You lower your head, clear your throat for an eulogy. "She fought good," you say, and then burst into tears.

Pascal had been propping your brain up since you got the news, even while managing the bridge in your absence, but as you fall apart despite his efforts he frees himself enough to properly assess your surroundings for you. You're hardly paying attention, but something does dismay him, a thought he holds back until you've calmed enough to compose yourself.

Then he floats it up and you blurt it out in dazed, blunted surprise:

"How are we to dispose of her body?"

There's a vague sense of confusion around you before the air nigh on snaps with realization. 

The rhododendron isn't eating her. Whatever proto-identity it possesses as a plant seems to be actively fighting its natural instinct to gobble up this fresh, limp chunk of meat— or maybe it's literally kissing her forehead, you don't even know, you don't fucking know nothing at all it seems, about plants or otherwise— but feeding it your deceased crew members is pretty much tradition now, it's a display of respect, of your appreciation, a way of keeping them around in an indirect way, a superstition but one that _helps—_

Olvier shifts, just a little bit, but enough to completely jar you from your thoughts. (He'd been still as a statue until now.)

"We should return her to Alternian soil," he says, soft and solemn.

Mutters rise around you in a wave. It's a suggestion, but how? Launching a blastoff device toward the homeworld isn't unfeasible, some proper calculating and it won't even have to be manned, but without a helmsman how many hundreds of sweeps would it even take? Not to mention that it'd be destroyed on approach by the Orbital Offense, but then again, being blown up by a million lasers at high altitude and raining down the surface as smoldering debris sounds exactly like the kind of thing Fakiya would dig. 

But then Olvier floats up to the cherry enclosure, and you feel like a dumbass.

"Oh," you say, following him. 

"Let's turn her into ashes," he continues, burying his fingertips into the soil, the _Alternian_ soil, that his previous master had gifted you. "And spread her over the seedbeds."

You nod dumbly. Yeah, that's good sense— you absolutely cannot afford to have an exposed rotting corpse, or even a shallowly covered rotting corpse, and none of the pots are deep enough to really hide the stench or prevent sickness— 

"How are we to incinerate her?" Pascal asks him through your mouth. 

Olvier looks away from the soil, to you. It's the closest you've ever seen him to focused.

"We build a kiln," he says. "It's simple," he adds, and then glances away, like he's following a mote in the air with his eyes. "I can do it."

You believe him, and give the go-ahead for the maintenance crew and whoever else to help. It means commandeering many of the decorative rocks you have placed around the garden, but Olvier does seem to know what he's doing— even as he mixes up mud and arranges the stones in what looks like the foundations for a very wobbly castle.

You're staring at the ongoing work with distant fascination when Pascal informs you of a priority call, sourced to one Duke Herbalis Fernroye Evergrow. 

Well, there it is. The rest of the awfulness. Her death really was an omen; good thing she bailed when the going was good.

You send out a mental warning to the entire ship— an emergency codeword, something you and Pascal came up with after your successful but still alarming chat with the Spiceler. Having been caught so flatfooted, even with Visegrip's warning, was the kind of scare you felt it better to avoid. 

The crew nearby stops to look at you in alarm (except for Olvier) before resuming their kiln-building; some of them run off to their pre-assigned stations. Zaphir looks pleadingly at you before dejectedly making her way; her assigned station is under your desk, in your block, until you give her the all-clear. You, too, equip your dress uniform, dig up some facepaint and smear a mirthful Face around your eyes in quick motions. 

On your way out, you chop one of Fakiya's hands off and toss it to the rhododendron. They'd moved her body away from it, and it gobbles the limb glad and clueless; she would have wanted that. 

#

Your bridge crew is also dressed to the nines, spic and span, and Pascal is standing at the ready; Galiom fires up the screen and you stand face-to-face with the Most Excellent Duke Herbalis Fernroye Evergrow. 

He's an asshole.

For all he named himself a gardener thrice over, he was never allowed among the Horticutterists. Two of his previous plantations were lost to embarrassing cases of environmental collapse (two!), and another he blew up in a fit; he was also infamous for turning _other_ trolls' thriving, logistically important plantations into cosmic dust in similar fits. That alone made him horticutterist poison, and you disliked him on principle.

Looking at him now, your contempt sinks to new depths. Because he's fucking transparent; in one glance, you and Pascal determine everything he is, and everything he wants, and exactly why he came to bother _you_ , specifically.

"Wrathtor!" barks the middle-aged seadweller, rude and entitled. "I've got thirty ships on you. Don't try anything funny and maybe we'll come out of this as friends. Now get your rabble out of my sight— we have private business to discuss."

To his one side is a frozen, terrified retainer, his silks rumpled at the collar, a rusty bruise under one eye; to his other is a secretancillary, tablet in hand, face beaded in sweat. And scattered around him in a tacky display are a number of servants— slaves, you both agree— in varying states of dishabille, all of them grinning frozen at the camera in stiff poses. Because it's the height of class to contact someone you know shit about with your camera zoomed all the way out to show off your _possessions_. 

Yeah, pretty much as you guessed. The Duke wants to be the Spiceler, and thus he studied the Spiceler, failed to learn anything, and settled for aping his shell in the most half-assed possible way. 

You mentally instruct Navitrix to locate and mark the blockade's position and spot an opening for emergency absconding. You let Engisnër know to prep shield and activate if shit goes south. Pascal gives Talcha advance warning for an impending usage spike. For the rest of the bridge, you give a heads up. It's time to teach this bitch some respect.

"No," you say, and then your crew turns their heads at once to the screen, and you do the glow-eye trick on the whole lot of them, and together you speak in a spooky unison: 

" _There ain't no rabble in this ship. Only me. Say your piece, fish, for I got me here all of a dozen ears._ "

The fucker sits really still, and says nothing, while the secretancillary to his side sweats extra. But then his shoulders relax, and he chuckles— a skeevy, fake-ass excuse for a chuckle, but he does. 

"I see you run a _tight_ ship, Lord Wrathtor," he says, with a little smile. "I give you points for gumption. And more, I'll take your word for this claim of total control— but know that the consequences will be all the more severe should the highly sensitive contents of our talk _leak_ in any way."

"Sure, Duke," Pascal pipes up out through your mouth, and then locks your neck in place to keep you from turning around and straight up staring at him in surprise. You reach out mentally instead; roiling irritation, contempt, disgust, this is not the time, not the day for this brat game, miss me with this one-sided bulge-waving contest— 

He lets you soothe him, but he's still running hot. You'd forgotten how his anger felt. He's the very manifestation of unflappability, up until he isn't; and the things that piss him off not even he can quite predict.

Fakiya's death has everyone rattled.

Thankfully the Duke doesn't notice shit-all, and just begins his spiel. "You have acquired some degree of notoriety in the botanical circles," he begins, then raises a hand palm up— and his poor retainer hurriedly sets a wine goblet on it, which he immediately begins to swirl (fucking _really?_ ). "And I am forced to admit you show some amount of _promise_. Enough to put you in my list of prospective administraitors for a soon-to-be-annexed colony planet."

You feel the exact moment Pascal shuts all his feelings down and cranks his analytical brain to the maximum. God. It's never not terrifyingly rad.

"It's not exactly a glamorous job, this new world," he continues, still swirling his dumb wine, "just a small planetoid with some particularly undeveloped aliens in it. But it has glowing mushrooms, and my _moirail_ thinks they look cool."

Oh, shit, that's right. You forgot about this other thing that made him particularly odious, possibly because it was new. 

A couple months ago, he became the Condesce's moirail.

She hasn't actually officially announced their quadranting, but the tale goes that, after the Empress struck her previous moirail down during a luncheon, Duke Evergrow stepped over the body and announced to her his intent to courtship. She was so taken aback by his daring that she gave him permission to try. 

He's been throwing her name around willy-nilly ever since, of course.

"Being that I cannot take charge of a project so far below my station," he goes on, after finally taking a sip of his dang goblet, "but that to put it in undeserving and unskilled hands is _unacceptable_ , I have been preemptively evaluating candidates for the post. And that means you. I mean," he sips again, faster, "your evaluation begins now, it's basically begun already, but of course, it needs to continue happening even after our call is over. Obviously."

He upends the goblet, the bump of his neck rising and dropping in an alarming way as he does so. "So," he kind of sighs out, ignoring his retainer's offered hand in lieu of throwing the goblet somewhere among his cringing escorts, "while the whole, uh, actual job of conquering those dumb critters goes on, my assistant will be watching you."

"Your assistant," you say, not liking that in the least.

"My _favorite_ assistant," he clarifies, with a nastiness to his grin that neither you nor Pascal can quite find cause for. "And prep your transportalizer, 'cause he's going _right now_."

You mentally confer with the bridge in lightning bursts. The blockade is only 28 ships, and in fact 28 are all the ships in the Duke's fleet (in official records at least), but they're all equipped with the latest in siege weaponry, which means your shield doesn't stand a chance. They're pretty badly positioned, though, and Navitrix has about 8 possible routes mapped for escape. Gunneric, bless his overheated teal blood, lets you know he took the liberty of pre-charging your Planetary Perforator. You _might_ be able to blow this cosmic joint.

But still— it's a risk you're not willing to take. Not for this asshole, nor for whoever he sends in. They're not worth the adrenaline.

Galiom activates the transportalizer, then gives you a cool idea; you do the eye glow trick on him, and he turns to the screen and says, in a tone that's just like yours: " _Send 'em_."


	9. Chapter 9

_'Em_ turns out to be, surprise surprise, another seadweller. You know that because his outfit is a frilly number adorned with violet-tinted cloth fins. You know it's a him because his skinny flat twink thorax is exposed— his overly elaborate collar curves _around_ his nipples in the most useless way. 

You know he's a douche because upon transportalizing he immediately turns around to look you square in the eyes with a smug, shit-eating grin, like he just won at something. Having the douchiest cape, most probably. 

(His is translucent, fin-shaped and dyed a soft silver-to-violet gradient. You assume the small golden motif repeated on it is his symbol.)

"Hey," you tell him, flatly. 

"Why, _hello_ there," he smugly says, with a smug wave. You detect a theme.

"Well, there you are, have fun," says Evergrow from the screen, and the air fills with that weird prickly sensation-sound of an inactive channel; Navitrix lets you know that the twenty-eight ships immediately fucked off. 

This dumbass just got left on his own in _your_ ship.

Your new guest poses with his veil-cape-thing draped over his elbow, his chin raised high. He stares at you through his nostrils. You just stare the normal way.

"You got a name?" you ask, finally.

" _Finnes_ ," he intones, " _Saldor._ "

"Alright then, dude, I have no idea what to do with you," you tell him, quite truthfully. 

Saldor snorts, looks around at your bridge. His smugness gives way to confusion.

"The hell are these… _things_?" he asks, staring at— oh.

So the bridge is covered in Zaphir's doodles, and no one thought to take them down, looks like. Well, not like they're particularly visible from the camera's angle, you don't think, but… yeah.

"You got a problem with my artwork?" You ask, walking up and leaning down a bit over him in a very basic loom.

Saldor snorts again. You get the feeling he uses snorting to communicate some specific level of looking down on people, but in a way that you're not supposed to bring attention to. 

"Oh, no, not at all," he says, in this annoying nasal drawl. "I'm, ah, impressed with your skills."

"You better be," you say. "The Messiahs bound me honor-wise to kill anytroll what insults my art. Because _they_ be guiding my art hand."

You step back and admire the way his face freezes a little before going back to smug.

"Interesting— anyway," he says hurriedly. "I'd like to retire to my quarters, if ya'll don't mind."

"Cool," you say, then turn around to the knicknack drawer hidden under the communicator screen's panel. "Here's your guest pass then, meals are all up at—"

"My _what?_ " he exclaims, with great emphatic indignation; from Pascal's eyes you know he lifted his cape-draped arm in front of his face like a tacky shield.

"Your _meals_ ," you say, slower, "are all up at twelve-hundred at the—"

"No, no," he interrupts. "I mean, _guest pass_? Are you treating me like a, a…"

"Guest? Yes." You continue where you left off. "Meals, twelve-hundred, at second-level nourishment plaza." You turn back around to him, raise the temp- and limited-access tracker ring he'll be using. "Any questions?"

"Yes!" He screeches. "I demand you give me your _biggest_ block!"

You stare at him, raise an eyebrow. "Our biggest—"

"I _outclass_ you!" He shrieks. "I _outrank_ you!"

"That I don't think you do," you pipe up, but truth is, he got you stuck in a conundrum. You don't really want to make him think you'll do whatever he screams you at for, but also, this seems like a prime opportunity to really fuck with him. 

"I am _evaluating_ you," he says, imperiously and with exaggerated dignity this time, and you just shrug.

"Well," you say, lightly. "Pretty sure our biggest block is the brig."

"Are you mocking me?"

"No, I mean it. Engisnër—" she gamely opens up a big map of the ship, even as he sputters at your back. You point at the brig in the map; it's no longer in its real size, what with the secret laboratormentory recently added, but this dumbass need not know. "So here's the brig, if you see, it's pretty roomy, not very comfortable but we can probably improvise some shit for you, drag in furnishings from them guest blocks or whatever, it's your call."

" _Your_ block," he says, through gritted teeth. "I want your block, and I want it now."

"It ain't that big, though," you say lightly, but your brain (or Pascal's) is racing. So he did get dumped here, alone, in your ship, for a reason. And whatever it is, it involves getting in your block, and being inside it, alone, possibly for some amount of time. 

Duke Evergrow wants to be the next Spiceler. Or rather, he wants to be _the_ Spiceler, in all but name and actual coolness. 

And you were contacted in secret by the Spiceler. To make secret dealings. In _secret_. 

Yeah, these guys really aren't being subtle. 

"Liar," he hisses at you, all snake-like. "You are the commander of this ship, an admiral of the fleet. A minor admiral of a minor sector in charge of a minor ward in a minor district of the Empire, but an admiral you are. What manner of block would you assign yourself, if not the biggest and best one?"

"The more strategically placed one?" You say, legit confused at this point. "And I don't need that much space to be an admiral, anywhichway. I think you got me twisted, bro."

"Hah!" Finnis smirks at you, extra nasty. " _Strategically_ placed? You have a transportalizer right here. Why would placement be any kind of concern over _appropriateness_?"

You pinch the bridge of your nose. Not because this dumbass is more headache-inducing than other dumbass, nor because you're particularly frustrated, but because the gesture conveys a level of _done_ that you feel he needs to be made aware of; you can play at theatrics too, and this guy seems to communicate better in dramateese.

And while you do that, you mentally poke Zaphir. You're not far enough in her training that she's good to process a quick sensorial infodump, so you can't give her the full deets, but you send her a couple impressions— unwanted visitor, big snoop— as context for your emphatic order to haul ass to the kitchen. 

That done, you drop your hand and stare full and hard at him.

"Ain't no fault of mine you've never seen a real battle," you say, straight-up seeking to offend; by the look on his face you succeeded. "When you got alien ships a-ramming, and pirate lasers a-zapping, and traitors and heretics and bullshit trying to get you good and dead. First thing a smart enemy will do is fuck with a bro's internal comms. Second is to fuck with a ship's pads. I can shrug off the one. And I can shrug off the other, because my block is right there. Don't be rolling your ganders, chumbucket, I'm passing on the knows on how to be a big troll here. You doubt me? Come look at my big troll quarters, and shut the fuck up."

And _now_ you have his attention. 

You bypass the transportalizer in favor of the entrance, walking at a leisure pace, noisy boots in case Zaphir is in the area and needs hurrying on. At your back Pascal gives you a livefeed of Saldor turning his nose up at a variety of directions, as if an utility corridor had a duty to impress him or somesuch. You go down a flight of stairs— everything level with the bridge is essential ship stuff— and smack the pad by your door in a big showy slap.

Your door doesn't open by palm, actually. Pascal hit your code all discreet-like from way back. But hey, let this guy hunt down your palm prints if he gets it in his thinkpan.

The door slides open on an innocently empty block, standard-sized, with your desk and idling husktop, your chair pushed into place all neat-like. The cookie and candy jars have been hidden, as well as the crayons; the pile of drawings was shuffled haphazardly into your in-tray, which suits your little lie just fine. Other than that, of course, there wasn't much else Zaps could do to hide her presence in such short notice— her coon is right there inside the furniture rectangle, surrounded by plasticky knick-knacks, with your big bifurcated one awkwardly standing on the wall opposite. There's a bare space in the middle which you prize for the feeling of openness, but which Zaphir's addition has abbreviated. 

You feel like you're looking in on your room as an outsider for the first time, and it looks kind of awkward, half-homey-half-shabby and lacking proper decorating. You feel a pang of embarrassment despite yourself, which amuses Pascal to no end. 

Saldor stalks into the block in slow disbelief, squinting here and there with his skinny neck craning to and fro behind his gaudy collar. He pulls your seat, but just stares under your desk instead of plopping down as you expected him to. He shuffles through the doodles on your tray, then peeps at whatever boring documentation was underneath them. He pushes at the wall behind your desk, then moves about knocking and testing the other walls quite brazenly, without so much as looking your way. He pokes the shelves around Zaps' coon, then squints at the bare floor as he stalks to the middle.

"Is this _it?_ " he asks the floor, with great indignation.

"You got a problem with my block?" You ask lightly, studiously ignoring the singy-songy ha-ha-haing Pascal has planted in your head. 

"Fuck yes I do, _you can't live here!_ " He glares at you, teeth bared. "This can't be where you spend your time!"

"Of course it ain't," you say. "I spend my time in the _bridge_. Because I run this fucking ship. It's called having things what to be doing, and you oughta try it sometime. You done snooping?"

" _No!_ " he cries. "I mean, I'm not snooping! Don't blame me for disbelieving, this block is a literal affront against your station—"

"My station don't give a fuck," you interject.

"And also, it can't be yours, because it has _two_ coons." He grins suddenly. "Yes! That's it. This is an underling block you're trying to pass off as yours, but you made a mistake, because it houses _two_ lowbloods, _ha!_ " he points at you, victoriously.

"I sleep with my moirail," you say flatly.

"Well, how come you never brought _that_ up before, huh?" he asks, turning his grin up to smug.

You grab him by the neck and manhandle him out into the corridor. "Because that ain't your business, you little chucklefuck, and I'd be careful whatever dumbshit ideas you have about what _is_ your business, because it is _none_."

He doesn't retort right away, busy as he is with massaging his neck, but he narrows his eyes all sullen at you.

"And if you get any dumbshit ideas about whining back to the Duke, then by all means make your way the fuck outta here," you go on. "I didn't get to be a big-time gardener by letting whatever little shit stomp on my crib. You thread light now, fishface," you stick a finger near at his face, "'cause this entire ship is my lawnring."

"I am _evalua_ —" he starts.

You slap his face, light and casual, just to jostle him a little. "I don't need that planet. I lived and thrived without it all up and fine and if I get it, cool, if I don't, cool. Changes nothing. If you're here to evaluate how good I am at asskissing then go back before I make you into compost."

He stands there, frozen, and you try not to hope too hard that he'll get the hint and hop off at the nearest station. His wibbly lips and surprised eyes tell you that he's considering it, yes, but there's a stubborn set to his shoulders what tells you he's stuck his pride where pride ain't no place being.

He sucks in a big forced breath through gritted teeth and you know right away he's gonna stay.

" _Fine_ ," he grumbles. "Stick to your fabrications if you will. I'm not here to evaluate your living quarters. But!" He draws himself all up to his like two inches of dignity. "I _will_ evaluate you on your skills as a _host_. I'll take the damn guest block— but it better be up to my _exacting_ standards!"

"Sure, whatever," you say, willing to take this as a sign that the absurd conversation is winding down.

"It must be your _biggest_ guest block," he starts. "With a seadweller-standard recuperacoon— _and_ seadweller-standard sopor, it goes without saying— as well as an Alternian-ocean-standard water tank, twenty-thousand gallons _at least_ , because I'm a seadweller and I dwell in the _sea_ , this is a matter of maintaining my health! And if you neglect it Duke Evergrow _will_ hear of it, I assure you. Why aren't you taking notes?"

You kind of snap your eyes back to him— you'd taken to staring at the wall in an effort to keep your attention from wandering— and see that he's got his arms crossed and is staring at you.

You replay what he just said in his mind and Pascal confirms that, yes, he just spoke those words, at you, and yes, he seems to be expecting a response of some sort, from you. 

You turn to look at Pascal, just to make sure. Yes, Pascal has his portable device in hand, stylus at the ready, a small list visible on his screen. 

Pascal looks back up at you, his face a nice smooth blank. This guy's a special one, he thinks at you. Ain't that the real of it, you think back.

You turn back to Saldor, who's _still_ looking at you— and then glances at Pascal, back at you, and then does a double-take as if he'd only just noticed Pascal was there.

You raise the palm of one hand and pinch the fingers on the other and mumble slowly, " _take notes_ ," while moving your pinched fingers.

He bristles, and then very emphatically turns on his heels to face Pascal.

"Well?" He asks again, all bratty petulance. "Are _you_ taking notes?"

Pascal nods. 

"Good! For my carpeting I demand—"

You go back to staring at the wall and deliberately check out of the conversation. Of course this guy will be expecting surveillance, but you got no interest in whatever scheme he's got cooking, alone in your ship with no security or staff of his own. Sadly you _can't_ ignore this liability no matter how hard you wish you could just kinda ghost him until he exploded, and Talcha will have to be put on grubsitting detail as a matter of ship security, but that's about as much as you're willing to humor the little fuck. You'll show him around the garden since that's ostensibly what he's here for, but you very much doubt he even knows how to fake giving a shit about plants.

And as for his stupid guest room, which he expects to be decorated in golden filigree and wallpapered with his symbol… well, now that you think about it, aren't you all of an artist now? Don't the Messiahs' guide your hand? Might be you're feeling host-ful after all. You don't remember the last time you drew a thing free-hand, so it's gotta be good for a laugh. 

You smile to yourself and finally deign to look back at the guy. He's very earnestly specifying the make and model of his wardrobifier to Pascal. He ain't getting shit. At least he does imply he's packed, so you're not expected to provide him with the clothes themselves or anything; else he'd be walking naked in no time.

"Eighty slots, you get me?" he says, and Pascal nods. "Are you sure? How many slots?" Pascal turns his portable device's screen at the dumbass for scrutiny. "Ugh, alright. Don't you ever _talk_?" Saldor turns to you. " _Does_ he ever talk?"

"I ate his tongue," Pascal pipes up through your mouth. "For cheek."

"Oh," he says. "Okay then. I'll let you know if I remember anything else," he says— to you, not to Pascal, who apparently ceases to exist once there are no notes to be taken— with a dismissive flap of his hand. "In the meantime—"

"—I'm showing you the garden, of course," you cut in. "Since that's what you're here _for_."

"Y-yes," he agrees hurriedly; and you drag him longways toward the gardening wing, a hearty and bracing ten-minute trek which you make in the widest stride you can maintain. (A dude can't talk if he can't breathe.)

Once you arrive it turns out you'd completely forgotten about the kiln thing for burning Fakiya's body. She's nowhere to be seen, but a huge stone oven does stand in the cleared space in front of your cherry tree, long and narrow. It has no chimney and makes no smoke; rather, at the base there's an opening through which you can see a great many dry branches, sheafs of paper, and even some barbecue coal.

A portable ventilating device rotates weakly at the fire's general direction. Around the kiln, a good chunk of maintenance, cleaning and tech crew sniffle softly, while Olvier has his hands clasped and eyes closed in what is clearly some intense prayer.

Saldor wheezes a bit at your back.

"What, uh," he wheezes more, "that?" He raises a feeble arm at the kiln's general direction.

"That's my kismesis," you say.

"Bwuh?" he bwuhs.

"They're baking her." 

"Oh," he says again, staring at the strange spectacle with the most hilariously nonplussed face.

Whatever misconceptions he all up and gets in his noggin, you immediately resolve to never correct.


	10. Chapter 10

Galiom, bless his true mirthful soul, took the liberty of sending Visegrip a report on your new addition as soon as it transportalized over; thus you already had a ton of messages on the topic by the time you disengaged from the little remora and got back to your block. Most of them weren't even hers, but from horticutterist seniors, and also like a couple of peeps you never knew about. 

They were from the _other_ society, you come to learn soon enough. The whole lot got you roped in a big group call, with the most haphazard introductions before moving straight to the topic. 

"You did the right thing," one of them, a seadweller, tells you earnestly. "Evergrow is _nuts_. If you slipped away he would hunt you down, full-stop. Normally that wouldn't be an issue, but he's slightly _irreproachable_ for the time being."

"I don't give him till mid-sweep before he gets culled," says the other, also a seadweller— a lady who looks to be same in age as the Duke. "He's overstayed his welcome and his competence. But the Condesce is amused for now, what can we do."

She sips some wine— from a small dainty glass goblet, which she then lays back on the desk with a rueful sigh. All your interlocutors are alone, squirreled away in offices or personal blocks; only you have company, and even then Pascal is mostly keeping out of sight, playing signs with Zaphir.

"It's full weird that he just up and offered you an unconquered planet," says Challi, the teal secretancillary in charge of the Society's… most everything, you're pretty sure. She's shuffling through reams of papers even now. "For starters that's usually our job, it's what the Society is _for_ —"

"He hates the Society," Visegrip says. "Using his new status to go above our heads is probably the most fun he's had since he last passed out drunk on a slave."

Holy shit, Visegrip isn't pulling out any stops here.

"Hmm, I think he's just bluffing, I do," Challi says mildly, still half-looking at her papers. "We only recently got an advance notice of interest in the planetoid's cultivar potentials. Like, those glowing mushrooms he mentioned, we just got the samples. If I had to _guess_ —"

"He lied through his fuckin' _teeth_?" says a fellow purple, who looks to be yearning to squeeze necks. You're half-tempted to send him a private message telling him he's allowed to chill.

"Between now and the completion of bureaucratic procedures, there's enough time he can just say you didn't pass his evaluation, so yes," Challi confirms. "He bullshitted the whole thing to get our little Sir Glub in."

_Sir Glub_ was the name Galiom used in his initial reporting. You've pretty much already forgotten whatever his actual name was supposed to be.

"The question is _what_ he's up and after," says your purple brother, teeth gritted. "We know he's got it in for Ol' Spice, so chances are he's angling for to cull him while he's got it good with the Empress."

"Might not be _that_ complicated," you say, the first thing you've said in a while. "I've got my surety on that he just came to me because the Spiceler came to me, and he just left someone because the Spiceler left someone."

The fact that Olvier was a gift from the Spiceler is one of those things you couldn't exactly hide without being suspicious as fuck. The gossip mill already thinks you deal in pail-stoker; you elected to let them assume Olvier was a pail-stoker specialist on rental.

"Sounds like him, alright," Fish Lady says. "He's a poor mimic, but he's nothing if not dedicated. The problem is your new guest— does he strike you as more cunning than his master?"

"Mmmmm," you hesitate, "not by much, but yeah? Kind of?"

"Then there's a possibility that the plan was his to begin with," she says. "He sees his master wishes to know of your business dealings with his enemy, and volunteers for the approach. Because if the Duke were to send someone of equal hemosocial standing to little Olvier…" she smirks a little, very subtle. "Well, his envoy's loyalty would only last as long as it took to transportalize. At least he understands _that_ much about his leadership skills. Or his little protegé does." 

"So the kid wants to suck up by snooping for the Duke," your Brother sneers. "Sounds too _simple_. I ain't gobbling that."

"Some people are alarmingly uncomplicated about their rot," Visegrip says, soothingly. "I see this a lot among smugglers— flattery and childish scheming catapulting all sorts of idiots to the top, and back down just as soon."

"Speaking of catapulting idiots," the younger seadweller says, "and of smuggling… is there a chance they might have caught wind of the Spiceler's project?"

Your entire screen stiffens, you most of all. 

" _Wrathtor_ ," the Lady asks you, harsh and hurried. 

"Not from us," you say, half-confident, half-sweating. "Everyone in my crew gets mental shield training, even the Cleaning Squad. The weakest one can tell a psychic touch right away. And there's only been one group on leave since we started, and they're all back and all accounted for, and techies besides, all of olive and up. Not one on the project. I trust them to keep quiet with whatever crumbs they got."

"But there _is_ a project," he says, mildly, and now everyone freezes again. _Fuck_.

He shakes his head slowly. "See, that's the issue," he says. "That you're doing him a personal favor is obvious just by looking at the evidence. You're approached by a thirty-ship escort— that's always been how the Spiceler conducted private meetings with unknowns— and then given a gardener. A secret pail-stoker operation would be a good enough explanation, except that someone who follows the Spiceler's dealings as closely and as obsessively as the Duke is _bound_ to notice that he's either accumulated hundreds of secret pail-stoker operations in the last few centuries… or that he's covering for something else."

You all digest that for a bit. It can't be argued.

"It might be he's _hoping_ to find something illegal enough to hit the Spiceler with," he continues, mildly. "It might also be that he's hoping to interfere with _you_ , rather than him— because frankly, the Condesce has known the Spiceler for infinitely longer than the Duke has even existed. What's a misdemeanor to that kind of acquaintance? She's brushed off more for lesser friendships. But you'd catch the brunt of it. He's petty enough for that, I have no doubt."

The Lady picks her wine back up, her lips set in a tight grim line. Visegrip rubs her face. The Brother bites his lip.

"Couldn't we hit him first?" he asks, in a frustrated tone you feel to the bones.

"Honest?" says the Lady. "If he'd pulled this stunt _without_ being a prospective Imperial Moirail, the Horticutterists could probably move against him as a group for the offense of overturning their authority. Right?" Visegrip and Challi nod, the latter still distracted with her papers. "But now it might be seen as an attack against the Empress herself. So… we wait and hope she tires of him soon."

"And what do I do about the little shit?" you ask. "Because I don't feel up to kissing his ass or gold-plating the guest coon or whatever he came up with last."

"Oh, _him_ I wouldn't worry about pleasing," she says, smiling all elegant-like. " _He's_ not the prospective Imperial Moirail. He's an underling the Imperial Moirail sent on his own authority, for his own ends, without any assets or backup— the Duke may as well have named him The X-Pendable and thrown him out an airlock, whether intentionally or not. He's a nobody under your full mercy; if he gives you a good enough reason for a culling, literally nobody will care."

You feel your face stretch out in a grin. (Half of it is Pascal's.)

"The problem is the child," she says, and your grin goes away on the spot. "When it comes to a slave's provenance, the Empire's rule is usually _don't ask, don't tell_ — but there's no way someone that young was not poached directly from the homeworld. If he really wanted to cause you trouble, that would be one venue to press you in. He _can't_ know of her."

"And if he does," the other seadweller adds, "your reputation would take an immense hit. Nothing you couldn't roll with, probably," he assures you, "if you're willing to play the scumbag to the hilt, but it would mean that us more _respectable_ members of society wouldn't be able to support you openly."

"And speaking of society…" Visegrip says, slowly, and you nod. The Horticutterists' Society doesn't have any written rules regarding slaves, but they don't have _a whole lot_ of written rules they still collectively enforce. You wouldn't be able to remain.

"She's a smart cookie," you say, trying not to let on your nerves. "She knows she's gotta lay low, and she's good at sneaking around. Talcha's also on surveillance, on her and on the little git, so as to make sure they never cross path—"

"Brother," says the purple bro, mournful, and you drop it, dreading what you know he'll say next. "You can't be having her all up and sneaking about like a squeakbeast, you know that."

You lower your head, and through closed lids you see a shadow cross the glare of your comm screen.

" _I_ can if _I_ wants!" shouts a defiant little voice you know well, and you open your eyes and immediately pull Zaphir back from where she was busy slapping the screen. You plop her on your knee, and she immediately turns to you with wide drenched eyes and her mouth twisted downwards. "Don't send me away!" she cries, and to your horror she proceeds to throw her entire torso back over the side of your chair and _scream_.

" _Zaps!_ " you cry in alarm, trying to keep hold of her body even as it's both going limp and somehow completely insistent on curving back towards the floor at an alarming angle. "Zaps, no! I ain't sending you nowhere, it's okay! It'll be okay—"

"Aw, shit, I'm sorry, I didn't think—" says your bro, all stricken.

"Is your block sound-proofed?" Visegrip asks in a hurry. You nod, dumbly, but to your surprise Zaphir immediately goes quiet, settling back on your knee sullen and damp and mottled brown up to her hair. (" _Clever_ girl," says the Lady, sounding all sorts of pleased.)

"I guess…" you say slowly, tentatively, "it _could_ use with some tougher sound-proofing…"

Zaphir wipes her face with her shirt— carefully avoiding the inexpertly painted sign she wrote on it— and remains in mullish silence, staring straight ahead with mouth firmly pouting.

"Well," says the Lady, with this whole air of laying the topic to rest. "I do believe we'll be keeping her relocation as a last resort. My two personal floors on my flagship are free-range for rescues, I've held a few before and my staff is ready anytime— let's say our Sir Glub spots her; if you send her to me immediately afterward we can play it off as his imagination, or even use his defamation as an opportunity for culling. Is that fine with you, young one?"

Zaphir acknowledges the question only by means of turning her head further away; the Lady seems satisfied regardless.

"In my opinion— oh hey!" Challi looks up from her papers and her entire face lights up. "Oh my gosh! Look at her. What a sweetie!" She leans into the screen a bit. "And a jawbreaker, I bet! You do you, hun. But, uh," she goes back to her papers, "I was going to say, don't wait around or anything, just see if you can provoke Sir Glub into doing something untoward and get it over with. If you don't inform the Duke, we could buy plenty of time before he made anything of it. And also," she flaps a few sheets of paper, "I've been checking our documentation on the new planetoid, and I think I could make a pretty strong case for assigning it to you anyway— you or Reapneck, but for pissing the Duke off…"

"Why?" You ask, and your purple brother looks about as confused as you. 

"Well," she turns back to her papers, "says here the alien lifeforms are particularly susceptible to psychic manipulation, and there's a suggestion for using them as workforce. But also there's a comment from the Condesce herself calling them adorable. Or, wait," she squints at the paper, " _adorabubble_. We've had assignments like this before," she smooths the papers up, "and what they usually mean is that the Condesce doesn't know what she wants from the new subjects _yet_ — high productivity or… entertainment. And speaking from experience, one does not lead to the other. So," she finally sets the papers down. "One way or the other, this assignment will require an accomplished psychic who's also good at managing the critters without overworking and damaging them."

"Oh, count me right out," your bro shakes his head slowly. "I got no subtlety there. I'm good for usage spikes, mob control and such, but not that kinda long-term thing."

"Hm," you say, feeling a little unpleasant about the whole business. "I see what you mean there, I guess that's up my alley then. But I ain't worrying until it's certain."

"Fair, fair," she says, jotting something down. "The actual conquering hasn't even started yet, so don't sweat it until we send a formal summons."

"Really?" the seadweller asks. "What's the holdup? From the reports it seemed like such easy pickings."

"Hmm," the Lady purses her lips. "It's the Honeycomb-Moon phase, then."

"The Honeycomb-Moon phase," Challi nods along. "She's having fun with them, giving gifts, showing off," she explains to you, "playing the gracious guest. Impressing the locals. Officially it makes them more malleable to domination, but here between us," she smiles, "I think she just enjoys watching the lesser races gawk at our technological advancements— without the, you know, souring reminder of impending death holding their admiration back. The reports say these critters are _extremely_ excitable, so she's probably milking their reaction for all its worth."

There's some uncertain nods going around. The Lady doesn't seem to like it, and Pascal points out that Tarrakia turned into a poisonous cesspit due to similar grandstanding; might be there were more colonies lost in such dance. You don't see the lie. But who's to tell the Empress, no, better get on with it and not court risk? The _Duke_?

You suspect the Duke'll die when the planetoid goes to shit, and if anything is left for you to do, it'll be a nasty clean-up job with no visible hope. Like Tarrakia.

It'll be just your luck if the glowy mushrooms are poisonous.

"Well…" the seadweller says, slowly. "It seems we've covered everything there was to cover regarding this inconvenience, have we not?" You make vague noises of assent; you certainly can't think of anything else to add, and also, you're hells of tired. Talking is complicated, and talking to a bunch of people at once is exponentially so, and you're ready to speak in nothing but grunts for the foreseeable future. 

"Oh," says your purple brother, right as everyone is preparing to turn off, "can I talk to you a bit more? Mirthful business," he clarifies, "it'll be quick."

"Sure, bro," you say, gamely.

"I'll keep in touch," says Visegrip. "Let me know if anything at all comes up, and I'll be your relay point."

"Done and done, sis, thank you for always," you nod deep to her. 

"Same here," says the Lady. "My facilities remain open for any emergency, any time."

"I'll keep a fin to the water," says the seadweller, "just in case there's more to this business than what we've dug so far. And I'll keep an eye on developments in the front as well."

"Thank you, and thank you," you tell them, sincerely. "Here's hoping for future gabbing what's chill and proper rather than mess-a-fixin'."

The lady smiles as she turns her cam off, and so does the kid; Challi waves at you and Zaps before leaving, and so does Visegrip, with some hesitation. Only your purple bro remains.

_Reapneck_ , Pascal helpfully reminds you. 

"What's the haps, bro," you ask him.

"You do know you ain't be keeping a low profile forever, do you?" he asks, softly, almost apologetic.

"I— what?" you say, dumbfound, even though a part of you seems on the verge of getting it. (It's probably Pascal.)

He points to his eyes. 

"You can't get by on that alone," he says, and… your makeup, is it. "Not for long. You gonna need a proper Face, bro— not like right now, but like… get your think on it. Because that kind of eye contouring, in the Church deep where all the secrets live, that there is a _female_ Face that you don't want to be wearing. She is being an aspect most offensive and they don't condone the kind of madness you're all showing plain on your face, like."

"Why not?" you ask, and although Pascal isn't surprised, he _is_ as stumped as you for the reasoning.

Reapneck shakes his head, all helpless, and shrugs. "It's a thing in the _secrets_ ," he says. "I never got in that deep inside those wicked chuckledivinities myself, but I'm knowing this from hearsay. I can't—" he hesitates, "I can't _fake_ giving that kind of a shit about the tenets, ya know? They'd _know_. And the deeper in you go the weirder that shit gets, in a way that seems just left-wise of actual troll-kind. So most peeps kinda park in at the shallower side to get their piety on, just being all about the partying and the soda. I'm not even being all, like, noticeable if that be a thing you're worrying on. But I have a sorta-patron in there, a guy who _is_ good at faking at being a zealot. And the things he's all to be letting me in the know about—"

He shakes his head again. "But yeah, soon like you'll be all _visible_. Just by catching this couple of big-deal eyes, you already _are_ , sort of. And if you aren't toeing in with the Church then they'll have a problem with you. It don't matter if you an actual girl or not, and it don't matter if you weren't being in the know about any of this shit, because your face is all like to being your _allegiance_ , you know? Yeah, you put on a face at all, your allegiance is at the Church. But _inside_ the Church, there's being _other_ allegiances, and you gotta be careful, bro, you gotta keep up with this shit, ‘cause right now I am as serious as unfunny sin: right now what you're displaying all clueless at the universe is the allegiance that gets your ass dead. Get it?"

You nod, quiet and scared. That's… that's all sorts of unfair, you think, that no one ever specified that kind of stuff and just expected you to guess, or to go to them horrible noisy-ass orgies what you could never stand and just hope to catch some morsel of wisdom. And fuck if that might not be on purpose— if eschewing the orgies and not copying everyone's style wasn't in itself a tell for the Church on an undesirable.

You ain't going to no orgies. But you can scrounge yourself up a full Face.

"And here I just thought the grease was itchy," you admit, ruefully. "So I wanted as little on me as I could of…"

"Aw shit, bro, what do you _use?_ " He asks, but you don't even get to open your mouth. "Don't ever be bothering with canned shit, here, I'm passing on this bitchin' recipe—"

You get a bitchin' recipe.


	11. Chapter 11

You make good on your decision to half-ass Sir Glub’s demands with great prejudice, starting with printing out his list of demands and scrawling all sorts of corrections on it— mostly the word _denied_ in big shouty letters, in purple pen so he knows who wrote them. The coon and sopor you allow as requested, in basic but appropriate models; there are lows you ain’t stooping to and fucking with a guy’s rest is one of them. The big pool tank gets a DENIED, but you _are_ actually planning on a smaller container, as a surprise of sorts.

The rest you don’t even entertain. Instead, you gather a few volunteers from the Cleaning Squad and park your butt on his block with a ream of printer paper and adhesive ribbon, and the fucker walks in from his morning supper to see you _artistically_ scrawling his symbol in violet crayon, over and over, while your helpers tape them to the wall sheet by sheet.

You’re getting pretty _calligraphic_ here. A brother doesn’t just reach this level of abstraction willy-nilly.

Glub Saldor doesn’t dare interrupt a Highblood in his artistic high. Instead he just stands there, making his impatience obvious while he waits for a pause to get a say in. You don’t look up. You keep not looking up until your paper pile turns into floor, and the very moment you reach out to tug the next pile closer, he up and takes his cue.

“This _really_ doesn’t seem up to my specifications, _Captain_ ,” he says, as if you were captaining a mass trollsportation vessel and not a warship.

“Your specifications are whack,” you say, and point to the printed list, pinned up all helpful-like on the lip of his coon. “Details over there.”

You watch his shoes stalk toward the coon from the corner of your ganders, hear the weak little flap of him yanking it up.

“ _What is the meaning of this?_ ” he squeaks, after a couple seconds.

“Thought you knew how to read,” you say mildly.

“I am _evaluating_ you!” he squeals, and fuck if he don’t sound on the verge of tears. “As a _host!_ ”

“Bro, I am all to be _personally_ getting my very holy and precise decoration on at your goddamn walls, what more do you even _want_?” You sweep your elbow with grand performatics and draw the loop of his sign backwards.

“Aguh,” he says, “beh, ugud.” There’s more paper flapping. “Haw—”

You begin solemnly intoning the cardinal directions in ancient trollish, for no reason other than his monosyllabic gibbering reminded you of them.

“ _Silence!_ ” he screams at you, balls up the list and tosses it down. “I can’t _believe_ — I— would you— would you receive _Her Imperious Condescension_ with such— blatant— _flippancy_ —”

You turn away from your paper pile to look at him, finally, and scoot back to sit on your heels. You were _hoping_ he’d try that on to you.

“You putting yourself on the Condesce’s level?” you ask, _almost_ casually.

He all but literally backpedals out of the block. “No, of course not, I just—”

“Sure _sounded_ like that for a second there, brother,” you say.

“Listen,” he’s all reasonable beseeching-ness now. “This _is_ part of the evaluation, actually, that is, you’ll be expected to receive the Empress in the occasion she condescends to personally—”

“In _my_ experience, Imperial Protocol is all going on like this—” you say, adopting your Talking to Fussy Wigglers tone. “Our Imperious Condescension’s fancypants retinue is all like to be sending a message at us all up ahead of time, at least a week in advance, with her royal-ass specifications all detailed-like.” (Pascal had all of done this research proper as soon as the possibility came up.) “If they can’t be getting a heads-up at a bro all early and shit, then they straight up _don’t_ , and her visit ends up being an Imperial _Surprise_. _This_ means that if she gets all desirous up in her royal pan to stay, her staff will literally take charge o’ the ship’s livin’ quarters and put it up to snuff their own motherfuckin’ selves— because it would be literally fuckin’ _impossible_ for a bro to get this place all up to her liking in less than a week, you dig? And making her _happy_ is fuckloads more important than hanging some poor fucker like me out to dry for a lark. You get me, bro?”

“Um,” he says, all tiny.

“So the impression I’m all getting at with that fuckin’ baldface little untruth you just said right to my face is that what you’re _reely anglin’_ for is a fancy vacation getaway all up on my motherfuckin’ ship,” you continue, “To which I say is a flat out _fuck no_. I won’t be skinning this blatant motherfuckin insult you just dealt at me out your hide _just yet_ , but you just get your awareness on that you’re in some _hot water_ right now, fishy friend, you about _this_ close to gettin’ sent back to your betters as steamed salmon.”

“I—” he babbles, “wasn’t aware—”

“Now you don’t be claimin’ ignorance at me now, Mister _Imperial Moiral of Our Empress_ ’s MostTrusted Ship Evaluator.” You lean back over your papers, crayon stub at the ready, and send Pascal a reminder to buy Zaphir a couple new sets, this violet is getting pretty thin on one side. “You can’t not be knowing this most basic of protocols, seeing as it’s only your boss' _job_ and everything. And you can’t even be expecting at me to get my belief on that she ain’t up and visiting y’all for a bit of pap and shoosh?”

“Well, yes, of course,” he hurries to aggrandize himself, “I mean, of course she graces us with her presence constantly, but I uh, wasn’t actually aware of the existence of arrangements, on account of me, erm, being too far above the menial tasks involved.” Gradually he seems to be getting more sure-footed on his bullshit. “The preparation of her quarters is left to the appropriate castes; my only function in such events is to entertain Her with my artistic talents, and my wit.”

You send a note to Pascal to figure from Visegrip whether the Condesce has actually ever once bothered setting foot on Duke Evergreen’s anything.

“I bet she fucking loves your wit,” you say.

“Oh, she’s deigned to offer me a few kind words,” he says, with a daring you are momentarily in awe of. Mother _fuck._ What else other ludicrous bullshit can you get him up to claiming?

You sit back on your heels again, half knowing you shouldn’t be extending this convo with the fucker, but half enjoying the shit out of Pascal’s wicked amusement at this entire fuckin’ farce.

“Since we on the topic of evaluatormenting and the such,” you say lightly, almost despite yourself, “what is your professional opinion being at, on my fine motherfucking garden?” And then you add: “That being why you’re actually _here_ , and all.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding all casual-like, “oh, well, and I’m real sorry to say this, captain, but that garden and I haven’t started on the best fin, if you catch my drift.”

“And how’s that to being so?” you ask, drawing a couple random loops on your next sheet as if taking notes.

“First of all,” he starts up, tongue flapping at speed, and fuck if it don’t seem like he has some actual opinions that he’s in a hurry to be expressing after all? “What the hell was _that_ huge thing in the middle of the garden, with the recliners and stuff?”

“A rhododendron,” you say.

“Yeah, that,” he says. “Well, I hate it. It’s ugly, and it slapped me. That won’t do, you know,” he says, very seriously. “If Her Imperious Condescension saw fit to examine it at a closer distance, it might disrespect her in the same way.”

“It _slapped_ you?” You ask, genuinely surprised; you sure are paying attention to his drivel now. “But it barely goes a-flapping. You pulling my frond again? ‘Cause I can motherfuckin’ _check_.”

“It _slapped_ me,” he insists. “A huge fuckin’ leaf that wasn’t anywhere close to me before just came down and bapped me on the head. Why would I make that up?”

“‘Cause you just made up a whole bunch of bullshit at me?” you snap. “I ain’t _forgot_. A rhododendron _is_ all moving its leaves at times, it ain’t impossible. But it does that small and slow at best, and most times it just goes a-quivering for a second when it’s feeling happy.  But if what you’re speaking at is even slightly true, then it might be being in need of looking at. Or maybe you’re being a fuckin’ dumbshit what walks into leaves. Either ways, I thank you for the horns-up,” you turn back to your paper, confirm with Pascal that he got all of that, “I’ll be letting my gardener get his knowing on about it.”

“Well, yeah, about him,” he says, and your blood preemptively curdles. “I don’t know how you _stand_ him, but wherever you got him from,” and his voice turns to smug at that, as if he _didn’t_ totally know, “you got, shall we say— _shafted_.”

The crayon cracks in your clenched fist.

“Hehe, yeah,” he goes on. “I’m sorry, cap’n. Cheated, mocked, duped, conned, bilked, fuckin’ defrauded. He’s a _retard_. I mean,” he starts pacing the block, somehow utterly clueless as to your steaming wrath, “I suppose one can't supervise and evaluate _every_ member of their crew personally, not if they have _real_ duties, like I'm sure you do,” he adds gently to your kneeling self amid crayon swirls. “But whoever approved him sure needs some culling. You're an _admiral_! You can't be so bad off you have to resort to, well.”

He stops in the middle of the block.

“However specialized his skills, they can't be so hard to come by that you have to settle for some creepy drooling pan-case who can barely string two words together.”

Pascal tugs insistently at your attention, despite the timing, and you check in on his pan to share in some garden footage of Olvier tripping, lightly, daintily, over nothing at all, and somehow causing a spectacular shower of high-grade musclebeast fertilizer to fall upon Saldor's diaphanous cape.

“I am perfectly happy with Antias’ work,” you say mildly.

“Well, it's your ship,” he shrugs. “Just don't be surprised if Her Imperious Condescension has him culled for unseemliness.”

You are spared from coming up with an answer by the arrival of your little surprise— Melita, the littlest of your cleaning crew, walks in and deploys a water-filled industrial waste receptacle, painted white and trimmed with many, many tiny curls and flowers drawn on with a sparkly golden sharpie, one of them real thin-tipped ones.

It's so cute and dainty, you almost want one for yourself.

Sir Glub takes one look at it and recoils. “What the seven hells is _that_.” 

“That's your seawater tub,” you say, turning back to your crayon. “I thought I might scrounge up something what actually fits a ship block. You're welcome.”

You're not shipping in seawater from Alternia— not just because of pricing, but also because the last time you were at a homeworld beach it looked fucking gross— but you got a recipe from one of your new seadweller friends for a nice proper ratio of mineralized water, plant matter and salt what was good enough for an aquatic breathing apparatus.

It's the nicest you're willing to be to this fucker.

He inspects the tub with the gauging gaze of one who has never before laid ganderbulbs upon a ship’s inner workings, much less a waste container, but can sort of guess it was repurposed off a humbler object. He leans over and sniffs dubiously at the water, but you did tell the crew to disinfect it proper so you know he’ll find no problem there; he then squints at the adorable little designs Melita scribbled around the lip, so tiny as to be needing a sight-enhancing apparatus to really get a peek on at.

“…I appreciate it,” is his dubious verdict.

“Exe-fuckin’-cellent,” you say, and lay your crayon stub aside; there's enough paper now to cover a big stripe from ceiling to about coon-level, and you figure that's plenty enough for trolling purposes. You dust your hands on your pants and the crew takes it as their cue to start putting the ladders and tape rolls and such away.

“You,” says Glub, all of a sudden, pointing to one of your cleaners at what to you seems entirely random. “Stay.”

You bristle. “What the _fuck_ for are you ordering my people around at?”

He sits down on a molded carapace chair, which wasn't actually for him but now is, you suppose, along with some new footprints on his butt. “Oh come now, you can't possibly have an immediate use for this _entire_ lot, do you? I'm just borrowing one a little, I promise I'll give ‘em back whole.”

“…what the fuck for are you _borrowing_ my people at?” you repeat yourself, through a clenched jaw. 

“Really, now?” he says through a chuckle, like this is all just some light friendly bantering. “You gonna make me say it out loud? Come on. We both know what I’m borrowing them for, _Lord_ Wrathtor.”

His face… darkens. That’s a saying what you often saw in books and the like, but in this here moment you finally see the real thing, the meaning manifest; his idiot, witless wannabe look morphs, hardens into something cold and hateful and contemptuous and… you almost reach for the word “resentful”, but you couldn’t begin to guess why— anything you happen to have that he don’t, plenty of people out there have and more.

It’s impressive enough that he actually looks like an adult. It also makes his costume seem even more ridiculous and adolescent. And he’s hardly so intimidating that you don’t catch his nasty implications.

You turn to your squad, standing at ready for new ordering and only slightly nervous at the impending developments.

“Nobody obey a fuckin’ word he says,” is your instruction, and they salute and march out, stomping loud to drown out Saldor’s furious protests.

Last you hear him screech at the door before it shuts is: “At least send me some a’ your _actual_ Pleasure Staff!”

It takes you a second to realize what he’s wanting, and then your gorge rises.

You make for the kitchens, instead of going back to the bridge; you just aren’t up to doing boss-things after that _encounter_. Rather, you sit at the staff table and relay the absurd conversation to the cooking squad while scraping leftover cartons of ice-cream. 


	12. Chapter 12

Saldor is _decidedly_ unhappy after your last altercation, you learn from your evening report. To begin with, he made a concerted effort to trash the block, which mostly meant tossing the flimsy little carapace chair to and fro ineffectually and crumpling some of your drawings; he was too much of a coward to attempt to damage his coon or water tank, of course. After that there was some sulking, and then nervous, angry, nearly electric agitation.

Talcha dutifully enumerated the times when he went in and out of his coon, the times he dunked in and out of the tank, and to your horror even the times when he— in any other situation you would consider _that_ to be excessive information, but after yesterday's chat? Anyway, Finnes Saldor attempted lots of angry jerking off, finished a couple times, started crying and kicking the chair again in most other times. _Holy shit._

After a lot of… that… he finally gathered enough pissed off energy to get angry-dressed and leave the guest block, and then spent nearly the rest of the day cycle stalking through the ship in a decidedly suspicious manner. He even ran into a couple of staff; the cleaners and maintenance lowbies were canny enough to fuck off without being spotted, so they were mostly mid- and highbloods, some of whom were grilled over the non-existent Pleasure Block. Others were casually questioned about your own favored pastimes.

They all submitted detailed reports on the encounters, with varying levels of amusement. A few were legit angry. The ones who got the friendly chat all described him as slimy and way too friendly. A couple seem convinced he's digging for dissent.

Everyone seems to have a different idea as to what he's snooping after, but having examined all the evidence, you are pretty sure his current priority is getting his genitals stimulated. It's _probably_ not what he infiltrated the ship for, but it's what he's wanting, and you don't figure he's good at prioritizing orders or at not getting his way. Or at much of anything other than coasting by on his caste.

Still— he _is_ looking for something, and _whatever_ it is, he expected it to be in your personal block. If he didn't believe that to be your for real actual personal block, then it makes sense that he would snoop about for the possibility that you have another, more private hidey-hole, which, to be fair, you do. There's just no way he's getting into it without some heavy-duty maintenance machinery, though.

On the other hand, if you _didn't_ have a secret laboratormentory compartment in your ship, you'd probably just bury anything particularly secret in a flowerbed. Maybe under the rhododendron. Assuming it wasn't something either you or Pascal couldn't just as easily memorize for later deep-digging. But hey, Sir Glub hasn't even so much as attempted to touch a single plant, other than the (now confirmed) rhododendron leaf-bap he got!

And throughout your waking hours, questions rattle about in your pan like your nugbone is a fuckin' maraca. Why is this asshole here when he's so incompetent? _Why_ is he so incompetent? In your experience, when people seem to be acting in some incomprehensibly chaotic way, it just means that you're missing a fundamental part of their rationale. Just as often that bit is "they're dumb", or "they're also missing info", but you can't help feeling this missing piece has an actual picture in it.

Pascal suggests a big joint-pan session later— fuck, you shouldn't have even thought of deep-digging, why did you bring it up— but at the moment he has another report that you really should look at.

It's from Prince Bluglade Stormrip (he's the younger seadweller from your group call! So _that's_ him!!), with lots of news and info on the Problem Planet.

You retire to your block— the _real_ one— to examine that one, and also to keep a very miffed Zaphir company. Saldor is currently sleeping off his daytime exertions, but you still won't risk letting her in the bridge or anywhere he might run across her; you've had a pair of linked transportalizers ordered, so she can go from your quarters to the lowblood staff's quarters— where you figure Saldor won't go in due to whatever casteist bullcrap— but until it arrives she's stuck and very cross about it.

#

"Problem Planet" turns out to be more appropriate than you were expecting.

It's already been given a new Imperial Designation, a jumble of numbers and letters you don't even bother reading; its aliens are so primitive they don't even know about planets, and simply call it their land.

"Land of Wind and Shade", they call it, or perhaps merely the mountainous area they congregate in.

The aliens themselves are these adorable little lizards; you see a couple pictures and love them immediately. A few choice videos show them completely losing their shit over a couple discarded hats and a towel. You finally see the glowy mushrooms, and they're certainly pretty.

The problem begins with one single lizard, and its… _cult_.

Apparently, someone on the Condesce's entourage (or the Condesce herself, says a note from Stormrip) tossed a few snuggleplanes out from low atmo for shits and giggles, just to watch the little aliens lose their little minds over miraculous sky cloth or whatever.

That was okay.

One of the little aliens wrapped itself in a snuggleplane, a cute little number printed in the four quadrant suites, and declared itself a prophet of the skies.

That, too, was fine.

It bestowed its extremely excitable initiates with replicas of its own garb, obtained from fuck knows where.

_That_ was decidedly weird.

…but only one single staff member paid it proper notice ("pay attention to this one", says a note from Stormrip). A midblood in charge of communicating with the locals brought up the mysterious provenance of the quadrant blankets several times to Internal Resources, External Resources, and the Imperial Inventory, until finally taking matters into her own hands by straight up stealing all five extant copies of the item from the ship's laundromat over a span of several wipes.

At the end of roughly double that period, the snuggleplane cult had over thirty identically garbed members.

In an act of incredible daring, the midblood brought up the matter again to the Imperial Inventory, but at a time when Her Imperious Condescension herself was in the office for an Imperial Inspection ("grapevine says it was a tryst", says a note from Stormrip). According to the report, she elected to walk in half a minute after the Empress, with her stolen snuggleplanes in her arms, immediately saying "They have _thirty six_ blankets now, and they're NOT from our ship _OH MY GOD YOUR IMPERIOUS CONDESCENSION I AM UNWORTHY_ " and immediately prostrating herself at the Imperial Feet.

Her interest thus piqued, the Condesce asked what the blanket thing was about. The highly prepared midblood not only explained the cause of her suspicions, but also provided copies of her previous reports and requests, sent through official bureaucratic channels in quadruplicate as was appropriate. One of the responses she received, in actual official Battleship Condescension stationery, simply read " _nobody gives a shit!_ ".

And the cincher: this little "prophet", whose sermons she had secretly spied on, preached wariness against the Empire.

After culling the involved parties for incompetence (including the head of the Imperial Inventory she had been, according to gossip, about to smooch), the Empress ordered that the source of the extra snuggleplanes be found, and the self-styled Prophet be investigated and, if need be, discreetly culled. A special task force was created. A psychic was deployed for the second objective.

He came back shook. The "prophet" _had no mind_.

He was culled for incompetence, and another sent out. This second one was smart enough to request backup, at least; she argued that the prophet may have been a mutant of its kind, with confounding brain waves, and thus the need to have a second psychic on hand to confirm the fact. Internal Resources paired her with a lower-placed psychic who was known to both loathe her and to desire her position. A third, friend of the first, volunteered to go as well. At least _one_ of them, Internal Resources believed, would be motivated enough to do a proper job.

The three of them came back _shook_. But ultimately sending more than one psychic proved to be wise. The three psychics independently determined that:

1\. The prophet _really_ had no mind. There was nothing to be read.

2\. His followers had minds. They were, however, dampened, blocked from their reading in some uncomfortable way.

3\. The non-culty aliens in their little village were just as pliable as ever.

Unable to do anything about the first point, and collectively deciding that the second point would require more delicate, extensive investigating, they concentrated their efforts on the third group.

From the villagers, they learned that every single member of the snuggleplane cult was known to them, sometimes to quite intimate levels, except for the Prophet itself.

The midblood from before was called back with her expertise. The aliens reproduced by laying their own eggs, she explained. And they paid particular attention to whose egg was whose and who was connected to whom by means of a common egg-layer in their mutual past. Genetic adjacents were as significant as ancestors. The fact that no alien laid claim to the Prophet or knew of its genetic adjacent connections was extremely significant.

Before showing up wrapped in a quadrant-print snuggleplane, the Prophet may as well have not existed at all.

Inspired by the psychic trio's investigation, the task force changed tactics; instead of focusing on the leader, they planted suspicions in the villagers' minds against the snuggleplane cult itself. Results were… underwhelming, as the aliens either immediately forgot about it, or did not act due to their emotional connections with cult members. For the most part, a general pall of anxiety over the little villagers was their only accomplishment. (Oh no!, you think, while at the same time feeling a bit stupid for caring. You kill aliens. They're awfully cute, but... you _kill aliens_.)

This did not, however, extend to the Prophet itself, bereft of connections as it was. Thus the task force went on to concentrate on the aliens who _didn't_ immediately think of something else as soon as a psychic left their minds. A number of them started wondering to each other who the mysterious Prophet really was, and soon the village was alight with gossip.

A few others, to the task force's delight, immediately went on to confront the Prophet itself. A psychic on duty even went as far as to mentally provoke the group during the confrontation, hoping to inspire them to violence.

To the task force's dismay, the cultists wrapped the agitated lizards in their snuggleplanes— and their minds became unreachable.

Having determined that the snuggleplanes were somehow related to the psychic blockage, focus shifted to their provenance… and immediately hit a wall. The snuggleplanes came from wherever the Prophet came from, and that might as well have been "thin air".

The midblood once again came to the rescue. She had built a rapport with the aliens, and offered to obtain, herself, an article of the mystery fabric. She seemed convinced that she could simply walk up to one of the cult members, or the prophet itself, and ask to join in.

She was then… culled for incompetence.

(A link attached by Stormrip leads to a report on the disappearance of a shuttle from one of the planetoid's newly built stations, and another to the ongoing truancy of several yet to be located mid- and lowblood staff. "Only two fates await those culled for incompetence," says a note from Stormrip. "One is to be an incompetent corpse. The other is to be a highly competent outlaw. Visegrip has already confirmed the appearance of a new quadrant-printed bandanna-sporting crew on her area. She should have some interesting tales when we talk next.")

The report ends on the results of experiments on several kidnapped aliens. You don't so much read as squint at them; the only relevant bit is that they found nothing of note. The blanketed lizards are as slippery as the naked ones are easy pickings, and the mental shield confers them a huge advantage in their craggy, mountainous, untraversable home turf.

Well, the dream of having your own planet plantation was as short and fleeting as Sir Glub's welcome. You're a bit disappointed. But at least you got some sweet little videos of cute lizards losing their shit over stuff.

You show them to Zaphir and hope that, whatever comes next, enough of them will survive to lose their shit again.


	13. Chapter 13

While adorable amphibians lose their shit over snuggleplanes in some planetoid, Sir Glub loses his shit in your ship over, you assume, a lack of pampering.

Certainly a complete lack of things to do can't be helping. He doesn't have a book to read, or a game to play, or anything at all it seems; whenever he's not throwing tantrums in his block or masturbating ineptly, he's stalking around the ship, squinting here and there, like he's trying to stare through the hull. Every now and then he stops at an air circulation grate and stares with particular intensity, his neck craned, head sometimes tilting here and there like he's trying to find a better squinting angle.

He doesn't try to keep up the pretense of gardening authority, and you don't bother to either; but he still approaches most personnel he comes across. At least he manages to fake his best behavior— possibly because he's found himself limited to cerulean and up, since you gave all teals and below permission to drop whatever they were doing and hide in the event of his appearance. They all unsurprisingly took you up on it.

…except for Olvier. Not that he has displayed any particular yearning for Saldor's rarefied company as such, but because to your dismay he simply— lacks the presence of mind to avoid him.

It's easy to forget, given your and your crew's general— chillness, you suppose, although it feels lacking as a word; but Saldor's assholishness has managed, in their altercations, to really put Olvier's affliction into evidence. Olvier doesn't seem to know what to do with himself when confronted with… anything at all, basically, as long as it's presented aggressively; he just nods softly to whatever he's told, disconcerting smile firmly in place, which means Saldor's homed in on him like a guided missile, making purposeful treks to the garden just to find excuses to blow up at him.

Unless warned in advance, Olvier simply doesn't seem aware enough of his surroundings to pick up on the stomping footfalls, the muttering, the swishing of silk. He'll hurry to the gaper stalls (and the secret lab) if instructed in time, but more often than not he'll obliviously work through a rain of notifications up until a whiny fish with a chip on his shoulder gets right up in his grill, and then passively weather whatever comes through.

He did retaliate at first, in small but inventive ways— such as purposefully turning a sound-sapling's pot at Saldor's general direction and getting him sprayed mid-rant with clingy spores, or strategically dropping manure where a stalking and raving seadweller might be about to tread— but his momentum didn't last; Saldor took to damaging plants— yanking leaves, crushing flowers— in his fury, and even though you had a few words with the bastard (more specifically two words, whispered at his earfins: _strike one_ ) and the flora manhandling stopped, Olvier still retreated into complete passivity.

Unfortunately, Saldor seems to enjoy passivity. Fortunately, Olvier has learned to retreat into passivity under the rhododendron's shadow. Thus, the absurd spectacle of Saldor screaming at Olvier from several feet away, barely intelligible over the furious shuffling din of a whirlwind of whipping leaves, became a common event.

That was most definitely _not_ normal rhododendron behavior. You sent a recording to Visegrip, unsure whether or not this warranted informing the Spiceler about (due to involving Olvier), or whether releasing it to the Horticutterists' Society at large would be rude to the Spiceler (due to abnormal plant behavior on footage involving Olvier); but before any answer came up on the matter, the ship had already collectively drawn their own conclusions.

…soon, you too find yourself calling the rhododendron "Fakiya". Weirder things have happened. And hey, she did still want to fight.

But apparently the novelty of screaming at a meek target from a safe distance is somewhat fleeting, and thus Sir Glub elects to seek a new source of adrenaline by barging into the bridge and interrupting a late evening video-conference with Bluglade and a couple of other tea snobs.

" _Wrathtor!_ " he barks, slamming the closing button at his back, then freezing under the collective disdain of you, your bridge crew, two fellow seadwellers, and a stone-faced indigo.

You and Pascal quickly shuffle through options such as "pretend he's not here", "ask him what-now in coldest possible tone of voice", "act extremely shocked and offended by his unbecoming conduct", and finally settle on "let everyone know who this is".

"Gentletrolls," you tell your interlocutors, smooth like you just completely forgot what you'd been talking about (which you _did_ ), "may I introduce you to—" Pascal kickstarts your memory— "Finnes Saldor, all of an honored envoy and representative of the Most Excellent Duke Herbalis Fernroye Evergrow the Moirail _Apparent_."

You're not looking at him but Pascal is, and you get to enjoy the moment Saldor becomes painfully aware of his uncombed hair, unwashed clothes and sleep-deprived face.

He attempts to straighten his back and look dignified.

"Really?" asks Bluglade, chuckling like you just showed him a tin of off-brand crushed up lemongrass and called it Darjeeling. "The Moirail _Apparent_? Are you sure?"

"Evergrow is known to cultivate a sense of humor," says the stone-faced indigo, looking even stonier. "Clearly he approaches it like he approaches all his other cultivars."

"And our lives are much enriched by it," says your third guest, joining his hands as if in prayer. "Salbur, is it? We are eager to learn why we came to be gifted with your presence."

Saldor seems to— not remember himself, that would be expecting too much, but to shake off whatever measure of self-awareness he momentarily obtained, and immediately turns back to snarl at you.

"The way your… your _rabble_ is allowed to conduct itself is _unconscionable!_ " And then he turns to your video-conference screens. "I was peacefully lounging at his garden, _such as it can be called one_ ," contempt drips from his very words, "when I happened to catch sight of— of—"

His face contorts, and he claws his hands in front of his face as if yearning to hold a neck between them. You all watch impassively as he cycles through all five stages of constipation, until he finally blurts out, all at once:

" _A rustblood coming out of a cerulean-assigned load-gaper stall!_ "

You stare, and he stares back haughtily as if sure of a favorable reaction. With a mental eye-roll you raise your invisible pen to your invisible notebook in your palm and say "Give a shit" slow and carefully; your guests watch impassively until Bluglade bursts into laughter.

" _Barbaric!_ " Saldor squeals with great dignity, waving his fists around like he's fighting off an annoying ghost. "Absolutely— disgusting— _crass!_ "

"Oh my god," Bluglade says, amid some hearty chuckling, "this guy doesn't know how shit gets cleaned."

"Evi _dently_ not," says the stone-faced indigo, staring down his nostrils at Saldor's rich albeit visibly unwashed apparel. (You privately agree. There's a box labeled "laundry" in his block, and he hasn't put a single fucking thing in it. Instead all his wearables are in a rank-smelling pile that keeps growing by his coon. You thoroughly instructed the cleaning staff on the fact that, if it's not in the laundry box, it shouldn't be assumed to be laundry, and they'll remain instructed until Saldor learns to fucking read.)

"Now, now," says the other seadweller, soothingly. "Clearly they were just doing their duty—"

"They were _not!_ " Saldor insists. "There were no cleaning implements, no hygienextirpating cart, _and!_ " He points triumphantly towards the screens' general direction. "I clearly heard the sound of the sopor-cycling mechanism!"

"Because we know ceruleans _never_ leave surprises behind," Bluglade snickers behind a hand, looking past the camera field; there's offscreen laughter, and even the other seadweller spurts a bit of a laugh through his lips.

"You embarrass your patron," says the indigo, face frozen and harsh like raw granite and without a hint of mirth. "Captchalogue cards exist. Even the lowest of the rabble have access to them. You desire only to cause trouble and take out your anger on the help." His lips twist in a sneer. " _Craven whelp_."

Saldor looks like he's about to say something everyone else will regret hearing, so you step up and grab him by the face. "I done told you before, and I'll up and tell it again, richbitch," you lift his scrawny ass by the jaw, shake him a bit to keep it real. "You got me _twisted_. You think I care you're here. You think I care what you see and say. You think I'll get my panties in a bunch if a cleaning squad sat hisself at a turd throne above his station 'fore wiping it clean. You'll find that I don't. _And what's more_."

You toss him up to the middle of the bridge, just so the other three get a nice view of his squirming little ass. "I kinda recall you asking after some _Pleasure Staff_ ," you say; you see revulsion flash on Bluglade's face, see stunned confusion on the other seadweller, see the indigo's face turn glacial. "I sure fucking can't forget how you thought I'd just let one of my cleaners stay behind in your block to suck your bulge or whatever. And now you show up, and you throw a goddamn hissyfit all up in _my motherfucking bridge_ , in front of _my motherfucking guests_ , all 'cause you're having a problem with a rustie who's all to be using the _wrong_ gaper when _just then_ you wanted to use that same rustie all like as to a bucket. Make up your pan— either you want a lowblood up in your grill or you _don't_. You don't get to want a rustie ass on you but not want a rustie ass on you at one remove."

For whatever reason Saldor stops trying to crawl back from you; he's looking at you with complete bewilderment instead. "Do you— do you _listen_ to yourself, you— you—" he whips his hands at nearly every word in wild punctuation attempts, before his face twists and he bares his teeth. "You _hypocrite!_ As if _your_ tastes were so much be—"

"Blah blah blah, whatever," you say, deciding you stopped caring for his casteist bullshit, and grab him up by the face again. He keeps trying to bite your palm, but you barely feel his teeth; he's got nothing on Zaps, that's for sure.

You toss him up at the door. "Now get your ass the fuck outta my bridge," you say. "You ain't welcome here. And stop harassing my gardener or I'll gut your fish ass."

He looks terrified for a fraction of a second, then randomly hisses "You can't _pretend_ forever!" before seeing himself out.

#

The conference call lingers a bit on Saldor's appalling behavior before moving back to the actual business of tea shipments. You suspected it and Pascal looked into it, but you're still glad to learn from the group that "pleasure blocks" are significantly less common and acceptable than Saldor would have you think.

Then again, although Bluglade's reaction did not come as a surprise and his opinion is known to you, the other two seemed to think of it more as a tacky, over-decadent waste of money and resources than as a disgusting violation of their personal dignity (much less that of its theoretical occupants). The indigoblood intoned his belief that any concupiscent relations outside of their respective quadrants were inherently immoral, to which you nodded emphatically while mentally shrugging at Pascal; and the other seadweller related an amusing anecdote from his early years in which he heard the term spoken at some party, got inspired, and built a "Pleasure Block" consisting of a bunch of table games he brought from Alternia with a shelf of colorful soporific drinks and a dilapidated music player for ambiance… only to accidentally get approached by the wrong crowd when he started inviting people to it.

It got a chuckle out of everyone, even a bit of a smile from the indigo.

Business signed on and finished, everyone nods their greetings and goodbyes, and Bluglade's screen very conspicuously remains on after the others turn off. You kinda mentally poke at Pascal in confusion— the report you got sneakily sent is all nice and snug in his device ready to be decrypted; it can't be about that, surely?

"Did I fuck up?" you ask him, because yeah, only some social faux-pas is left, and he's even got his face in his hands like he's wiping shame off of it.

"God," he says, with a voice tired like he just cleaned twenty cerulean stalls. "You? No. Hell no, you were pretty great. The tea sommeliers will love you. But those two are decent trolls, trustworthy as far as I've dug into them. And god, it needs to be said, and I'm trying not to puke as I say it. That thing about the load gaper stall?"

"Oh fuck me, no," you almost turn around and right out the door, find yourself rubbing your face almost like he's doing.

"I'm not _remotely_ kidding." He winces down at his armrest; an aide reaches in from offscreen with a crystal cup of pearly golden tea, you think the one with apple bits and tiny flowers Engisneer likes to brew for sad friends.

He gently picks up the saucer, and his eyes actually swim in a light sheen of purple tears. "It's not even a seadweller thing specifically, and hell if I know if that makes it better or worse for me. But there's a reason why that worm thought we'd care, and it's because people usually _do_. Like, wipe a seat down with your rust hands? Totally okay. Put your butt on it? _Cullworthy_. He really wanted you to kill that kid, whoever it was. As a matter of literal honor for you in front of us."

You flap your hands, forcibly lower them, flap them again. "What— that— _what!_ "

He sets his cup down, swallows thickly. "For all I know," he says, his voice harsh, "if little Glub there didn't look so obviously like a prawn full of shit in the head, they'd buy it. A violation of the hemospectrum order. A claim like that, coming from someone _respectable_ , would carry a lot of weight. And I mean, clearly it wasn't intentional, but you bringing up that Pleasure Staff thing was nigh on a stroke of genius, else you saying you didn't care would raise a lot of eyebrows. But with that, it makes it clear he's stirring shit and doesn't have a fin to stand on. And," he takes another bracing gulp of tea. "Failsafe's rant— highbloods definitely, undeniably, take advantage of working lowbloods in private settings. They'll shit-talk Pleasure Blocks in one breath, and blow their next breath down the neck of their own staff. And then they'll cull them for taking a dump in the wrong stall. It's fucked up."

He shakes his head, takes a deep breath from the tea's steam. "Well," he says, "at least with that prawn, if he tries to pull it again, you know just how to deflate his bladder. Among respectable highbloods, it's considered extremely embarrassing to be caught cavorting with the help and then killing it. Etiquette says sexual favors should warrant at the very least an overlooking of small transgressions, you know?"

"Sexual _favors,_ " you repeat dumbly.

"Yeeeeah," he nods, drinks the dregs of his cup with a grimace. "You know, if you rip someone's shirt off, at least give them a new one later, one good enough they can maybe sell for something they actually want."

" _Favors_ ," you mumble.

"Favors," he confirms. "Just like how the _Lowblood's Right to Living_ is all about when to cull them and who gets to own them."

"Saldor is seeking _favors_ from Melita right now," you finally manage to spit out.

Bluglade fumbles his cup, manages to grab it before it rolls off his lap. "Shit!" he says. "Okay, we'll talk later. Go!"

#

Bluglade had been in the middle of his "sexual favors" explanation when Talcha contacted Pascal, who was mostly open to you, and the superposition of topics kind of made both your brains stutter. But basically the little bastard had resumed his sulky roaming upon ejection from the bridge, and happened to come across a distracted Melita in a service corridor. Why was he even there? Wouldn't that place be beneath his notice? At that point it didn't matter. He pounced on her and Talcha raised the alarm, and after disentangling your brain you _move_.

By move you mean you sit on your captain chair, close your eyes and poke the back of Melita's terrified mind. You meant to ask if she was up to scaring the shit outta this pissant, but she takes notice of you and immediately crumples back into herself. Poor girl, you think, gently slipping into the vacant places she left behind; you wanted to know how this happened but she's clearly in no condition to open her memories.

You'll ask with words later. For now you crank your glow up to eleven and open your (Melita's) eyes to the sight of Saldor's teeth, floating above your head in a nasty little row.

He's kind of plopping his hands all over you, giggling in a creepy drunken way, so you grab his neck and raise him up and squeeze till he chokes. He flails and smacks at your arm (or rather Melita's, which you're now reminded is kind of thin), then decaptchalogues a funny-looking pistol; you push it up away from your face with Melita's psi and it draws a wavy smoky line at the ceiling, glowing orange at the center.

This won't do. You marshal your (Melita's) psi and fling him back away with great prejudice, and the pistol goes flying.

(Melita's psi seems legit weak; Saldor only gets flipped back on his ass, rather than into a wall. You're too used to most psychics you know hiding their potential as a matter of course. You poke Pascal for backup. Behind you somewhere, Melita stirs in surprise.)

"Ain't we had this talk, fishface?" You say, climbing careful to your feet. This body is so small, it reminds you of Pascal when he was six; even for a rustblood, Melita is tiny and fey, the youngest crew member in your ship.

You don't feel the pain where she was tackled, but you know it's there.

Saldor looks up at you in surprise— he looks pretty big from here, even down on the floor, you note with disgust— and this time he does crawl back on palms and heels. You walk up to him and he pushes back further, and you don't want to pat yourself in front of a pervert but it does seem at least that Melita's uniform is in place, fastened where it should be, no drafts where you can feel them. It's jostled and crooked and no more. He didn't get much time.

You still would kill him, but the talk with Bluglade has you rattled. This is your ship and crew and domain, and yet— there are those above you who think tackling a rustie alone at work and being found is only gossip. As an honor cull this might not fly.

But… you raise Melita's small, dry, worn hand. You _still would kill him_.

Saldor's back hits the wall and jostles in him his second wind. "You—" he squeaks. "You _fake! Liar!_ What's your game, playing the goody goody, slumming it with retards and rabble and playing the little chrome-mixing subversive— who are you trying to fool? What are you playing _at?_ "

You step back a little so Pascal can get a good look in at where to hit, but Melita is full up and aware now; she's poking at you a bit, inexpertly on mind to mind stuff. She caught something funny about the way he's been talking at you.

You lower the hand just a bit. "Why do you keep talking like you think you know me?" You finally ask, legit curious.

Because… now that Melita brought it up, that really is kind of what he's been doing all along, is it not? You just got your assumption on that he was doing the annoying seadweller thing where they think what they say goes, and that everyone has the same tripe in their brains as they do. He certainly looks young enough to not have learned better. All the same he _did_ make it as far as Evergrow's court, and there's only so much stupidity senior seadwellers are willing to take from juniors.

And now that Saldor is staring up at you open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and Melita calls it not fear but _dismay_ , you can kinda see it too.

You laugh. You go _pfff_ with Melita's spittle and then throw her head back for a big gusty cackle.

"Oh, my mirthful fuck," you say, shake your (her) head to yourself. "I can't be fucking taking this japery. Did we ever meet before, my dude?"

"I— you— _yes!_ " Saldor stutters, and fuck. He looks so upset, it's like he forgot he was rubbing himself all over this girl.

Bastard.

"I sure as hell don't remember ever meeting you," you say, mirth gone cold. "But… don't take it too personal, my fish. I don't remember a _lot_ of peeps. It's a personal failing, this. Faces come and go, names come and go. Anything what means to stay oughta be less boring than that. And that's all there's being to it."

You raise Melita's hand again, and with a small application of Pascal's psi you crack his pinky finger all the way back. He barely twitches.

"I was going to kill you but good," you say. "But since it looks like you've been trying to get my goat under some bitching misapprehensions, I'm giving you a third go. I ain't know you, bro, or what you on about. Here's your chance to clean up face and get on my less bad side. Because I ain't heard a peep from the Duke ever since, about you or the garden or the planet or what, and that means you live and die at my whim."

Saldor sort of sags back into the wall, his arm twitching like it wants to leave the broken finger behind. He looks like someone's forgotten rag puppet. Which hey, is a pretty good way of saying he looks like he.

You walk off a few steps. "Oh," you say belatedly, out of misplaced sympathy perhaps, "and put your smelly shit in the laundry box, will ya? That's how the cleaners are knowing they're good to be washing. Else they won't touch it. My orders."

You leave him be with his broken finger to crawl away at his own pace, and walk Melita right up to the mediculler's block, slow and measured. You don't know how much you overdid it but you're sure you did just from the choking stunt, and the psi-flinging had her so impressed you're afraid you might of strained her brain; you tell her to rest until there's no pain to be felt, and Pascal lets the sergeant know she's on leave with full pay.

You get back to your body and the bridge with a stress headache and a cute little cup of tea, smelling of apple and honey, courtesy of Engisnër. The crew's chat group is effervescent, now that a grudge has been raised as possibility, and one of the kitchen crew even reveals he's been digging through Saldor's trollmblr and brackr stuff.

You can't even find it in yourself to read the dumb posts he's linking to. Instead you crawl back to your block, feeling like so much meowbeast puke; you're almost glad Zaphir's off at the low floors, her personal transportalizer covered in stickers and many little footprints, because your mood is foul.

You read Bluglade's decrypted report. You skip all the awful little amphibian experimentation stuff, and fuck if there's not way too much of it for your comfort; you skim over the remade colonization plans, where it looks like they're settling for breaking the little ones down after all. You also learn that they found _something_ in the craggy, nigh-untraversable mountains around their shady valley.

It was a dirty, frayed blanket, long abandoned to the elements. It was printed in small, festive quadrant suites, the dye still lasting strong. It was, upon laboratormentory examination, exactly the same as the five others an overly competent midblood had collected not so long ago.

You have no idea what kinda plot is unfolding before your eyes, but it sure is thickening. You delete the report, change out of your uniform and hit the sopor for a midnight nap.


	14. Chapter 14

It's closer to morning than evening, you're still dressed in under-armor padding and an ablution robe, your hair needs combing, your facepaint needs reapplying, and you're leaning over Zaphir with your arms akimbo and trying to look serious without looking _too_ serious, and trying to frown thunderously without frowning _too_ thunderously.

"And you got your lil' meatsack up in the air-circulation vents _why?_ " you ask, in a voice firm but not _too_ firm.

Because like, you get her, you really do, but also she's gotta get _you_ , and just how hard she could of fucked you and the entire ship up. You also don't wanna scare her pants off, or make her fear for her literal life, which between your age and caste gap it would be reasonable for her to regardless of your actual intentions, and you want to keep this chill—

But Melita is still at the mediculler's with her arm tendons all fucked up and her joints swollen from when you choked the little fishfuck. Her nose keeps running bloody from when you kinda sorta overdid her psi, and on top of that she has cracked ribs from when she got tackled. And she is being such a _massive_ sport about it all, such a complete little spitfire badass for you, that you kinda want to give her several bonuses. And possibly a plant.

What made your pump leap straight into your fuckin' mouth, though, was learning that Melita had been shoving little Zaphir _back into the vent she was crawling out of_ when Saldor caught up with them.

Zaphir was supposed to transportalize into a cleared up corner of the pantry. She was _supposed_ to remain in the kitchen area. She was supposed to only walk out of it while accompanied _and_ only when Saldor was confirmed to be distracted. She was supposed to only move between the kitchen and the lowblood garrison, which are deep in territory Saldor could not step into without standing out like an infected claw.

She was absolutely _not_ supposed to ditch a poor kitchen corporal at a corridor crossing and sneak into a vent. That she somehow managed the maneuver at an angle Talcha couldn't pick up was both a praiseworthy accomplishment and an absolute disaster.

Talcha managed to pick up on her sudden vanishing in time and extrapolated the cause easily enough, but you're given to understand the newly discovered blind spot has him so rattled he spontaneously initiated some deep analysis thingummy on all his footage that's using up nearly all his processing power. Pascal _did_ get the notification, and you know exactly why he missed it, since he was right there sharing _his_ processing power with _you_ ; it had to have happened during Saldor's little live tantrum.

The poor kitchen corporal is inconsolable and may probably never exposit on reduction sauces again.

Zaphir has _got_ to _get_ it.

She seems to have gotten _some_ of it.

"I didn't mean to hurt her…" she says, despondent, her voice tiny, fingers tangling up at each other. "I just saw her walking there, and I was like, I wanted to surprise her a bit, and I knew the Glub Man was shouting in the garden. I didn't know he left."

"Glub Man does lots of crazy shit," you say, firmly but not too firmly, and reasonable but… yeah, reasonable. "We can't count on him being where we put him last. That's why I want you always hidden with a crew— so if he goes a-wandering, we know where you are, and we can tell your pal how to avoid him."

"Why not tell _me?_ " she asks, perking up right away. "If you gave me a device I could just talk to the Ship Guy myself and we wouldn't need all this silly work!"

"Ffffffff," you say, or rather you kind of blow through your lips while pushing your hair back. You actually _did_ look into it, before Saldor was even a factor; but it turns out that adding a lowblood name to your ship roster and giving a lowblood a standard communications device are two things involving extremely different levels of built-in imperial snooping.

Not only does a new device compare the user's name and sign _and_ fingerprint against a Post-Exile Adult Registry— which you can register her in, but _only once she passes for adult_ — but it also tracks literally everything. A lowblood-assigned device has zero privacy. You're not entirely sure why that's worse than her name literally being in the official list of crewmembers that all imperial officials can access, but from Pascal's general expertise you've somewhat gathered that it's related to uprooting sedition. (Only fresh lowblood adults are seditious, apparently.)

But it _does_ mean that Zaphir can't have a device in her own name until she officially exists, and borrowing someone else's is likely to raise a flag. And considering her conversations in the current situation would all involve how to sneak around a seadweller, as well as dunking on said seadweller, they would look _totally_ seditious.

On the other hand pretty much everyone in your ship has obtained spoofed devices or privacy features from somewhere. So, as far as you understand Pascal's tech jargon, the big obstacle here is buying a hacked device from a trustworthy source in a way that can't be traced to your ship, one which will work even for a person who officially doesn't exist.

"Can you ask Pascal about this shit later?" you ask her, dropping your mild airs of authority. "There's totally a reason, but it only makes sense when he's the one doing the telling of it. Short of it is, I think it's gonna take us some time, so— for the time being," You crouch down so as to look her square in the face. "can I get my trust on of you that you're gonna stay where it's safe? At least till Glub Man is done being a thing? ‘Cause it'd for sure make me get my wicked appreciation on, knowing you could kick that kind of responsibility for me."

She twists her nose, look carefully into your face, then sighs in deeply put-upon resignation. " _Fine._ I'm going to be good. No nasty Glub Person is gonna catch me." She smiles at you, in a surprisingly gentle, understanding way. "It's a promise, okay?"

You nod to her, more deeply relieved than you expected to be, and set your hand on her head for a second, just to marvel at the size of her dome. So many surprises in such a small package.

It felt right at the time— giving Saldor a chance to reboot his act on the new understanding that you had no clue who he was— but now that it's been a few hours you're starting to think it's not gonna be worth it. You're hoping he'll step off at a station. You _literally_ had course set to the main system hub, and had it announced in the whole ship so he couldn't say he wasn't knowing about it. You woke up to learn he shoved all his shit in the laundry box, and asked for the laundry team to have it expedited so as to give the fucker no excuse for hesitation.

But he did come in search of some sort of secret, and after the night's earlier showing you can no longer assume he's likely to leave without it.

You finish equipping your gear while Zaps carefully gathers up her coloring debris— you got her a few array captchalogue cards along with the transportalizer, and she's been making the most of them ever since. She looks to be gearing up for another trip to the cooking block; before she steps off, you casually speak up.

"By the bys, good job finding a spot Talcha can't peep at."

"Heh, thanks!" she says, grinning bright and proud.

"So you _did_ find one!" You turn on your heels, arms akimbo and tell-off face firmly in place. "It was being no accident—"

Zaphir squeaks and jumps and leaps at the transportalizer, and you're left shaking your head to yourself. Zaps is too fucking clever by half, you swear.

#

You notify the kitchen sergeant and Talcha's crew about Zaphir— she may have found other blind spots, and might even be willing to tell someone about them, if you ask nicely. For now, though, you oughta get back to the bridge and the business of running a ship.

…you oughta but you hit the laboratormentory up instead. Just for a quick peek. What with Saldor and all you haven't been checking in on it nearly as much as you should, and you're kinda losing track of where the project stands.

Fortunately the others have been picking up your slack. The cuttings took root and are growing fast on the soil samples— definitely a wild, hardy little type, this herb— and there are lots of notes for you to peruse later, much to your relief. Someone even dug up the report on Tarrakia's original atmospheric composition, which you'd been wondering about. Your lethalchemist also up and translated this pretty scary chemical analysis of the cleaner underground soil into lay terms and made a list of what kind of products one might need in order to chemically alter a different starter soil into something suitable.

You feel kind of superfluous. There's no putting off the bridge work, then.

There's a tense unhappy kind of miasma brooding over the bridge when you walk in, a stifling silence you're loath to break. Your first instinct is to probe about in their minds, but you stop yourself; Saldor is pretty chastised, you're sure, and you get the feeling that it's an embarrassingly paranoid move to make.

"Something done gone down?" You ask, instead, sitting slowly on your command platform.

"Hmmm," Galiom grunts unhappily. Solace purses her lips. "That's what we've been trying to determine, Lord. Comms are weird, news is weird, but not in any overly suspicious way. Or you know," he makes an aborted, frustrated little gesture, "more like it's in an overly deniable way."

You slam-dunk your misgivings where they belong and open your second mind conference in as many wipes.

Engisner got a notice that your shipments of spare ship parts and vacuum garbs were reappropriated for Indeterminate Imperial Porpoises, and apparently your involuntary contribution to the Glory of the Empire is appreciated but ineligible for refunds; Galiom's channel surveillance changed from its usual chatter of inane backstabbing dealings and unencrypted gossip to confused lordlings confirming with each other that similar maintenance equipment deliveries were diverted from them.

Trollmblr and Chittr were effervescent with tales of diverted ships, equipment, funds, personnel, of scienterrorists suddenly pulled from high-priority projects by Imperial Fiat, of technicurtailers and investigarrotiers called near en-masse to conspicuously unspecified locations— only to suddenly and unceremoniously _not_ be.

And most damning of all in your reckoning, Navitrix got herself a notice that the Empire approved Star Map for the Section This-and-That of the Sector This-and-That of the Area This-and-That of the Arm This-and-that was considered Fully Finalized and would no longer be updated or modified for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of foreseeable, Solace is very slightly precognitive, and her guts feel heavy with all sorts of undefined omens and portents. On pure instinct you wake poor Pascal from his nap and confirm that yes, the newly-frozen star map area just so happened to include your little Salamander Mushroom Problem Planet.

Gunneric gasps out loud. "Did— something happen to Her Imperious—"

No, you all know right away, for what it's worth. Solace's gut feelings didn't materialize into certainty, which is what usually happened when their source was brought to light. But something weird definitely occurred on that planet, and you can't begin to guess what it was.

And you ain't likely to be told either, you don't think. Not with social media posts erased, not with star maps frozen, not with the Official Word keeping mum. You'll have to rely on the unofficial word of people you actually trust.

…assuming your highly informed friends will remain highly informed in this juncture.

But for the time being, you might as well put your collective brainmeats to things useful. Galiom goes back to listening in on careless people, and Navitrix sets about recovering the star map's last live update, just in case. Engisner contacts her tech friends in other ships and posts. You yourself want to touch base with your secret club pals, but with the extra scrutiny going on and the insecurity-dumbasses Galiom has been tuning into, you can't help wanting to be discreet and proper sneaky about it.

The best you can come up with is a group message letting everyone know that the chamomile flowers are budding and that you'll soon turn out another fresh calming batch for any rattled nerves.

Now you can only sit back and wait and hope people catch your drift. In the meantime, Engisner learns from her pals (and her pals' pals) that the reappropriated material was mostly for ship-building and vacuum-proofing. Galiom's snooping confirms that everyone in your ship's spy range is already aware that a massive censorsniping operation is underway, and codewords are in the process of being spontaneously generated. You get a couple messages to the effect of "thank you for the heads up, I'll place an order soon, wink emoticon". Navitrix's trickery with tracking herself down old live starmaps looks to be fiendishly difficult and not like to pay off very soon.

It's a painful couple of hours before an unknown ship comes into range and sends you an introductory communication request.

"It's Lady Wildsteel," says Galiom, with flat, tired surprise.

You've gotten a bit better at names lately; you unexpectedly remember that's the seadweller lady who offered to take Zaphir in.

Which means she doesn't exactly need to be contacting at you with an _introductory_ sort of ping, like you're being at unknowns with each other, but hey. These are weird fucking times. And you've never been formally introduced that you know of, so.

At your weary handwave, Galiom goes through the whole handshake transmission and connection permission rigamarole. He and his equivalent on the other ship exchange greetings and pleasantries in accordance to their respective captains' hierarchical position, formal intentions are formally announced, and you feel as though a solid perigee has passed before the big Lady herself _finally_ materializes onscreen.

She looks super made-up and blinged-up, way different from when you last talked; but her bearing and self-assurance are the same, and that more than anything is what you recognize her by.

"So _you_ are the tea provider that's being so talked about," she says, all sultry-like, and leans forward just a tiny bit, turning just a bit of side-eye, like she could get a slightly different angle at you somehow.

"Hope it's all being at good talk, my fabulous ninjette," you tell her, a bit unsure of whether you're being overly familiar or not. "Or a brother might get to be feeling unqualified to offer you his humblest service."

" _Oooh_ ," she says, all interested-like. "How unusual for a purple-blood to be so smooth-tongued. I have a mind to diversify my offerings in my tasting parties," she rolls her eyes delicately, "to lower the amount of drunken _mishaps—_ but I must admit to lacking an understanding of what leaf concoctions have to offer. I will have you prepare for me a tasting menu—"

Galiom suddenly smacks his station with a cheerful little cry, then leans back on his chair in weary victory. On the screen, the Lady looks at something beyond the display, and then drops her sultry act like it were so many pounds of tacky jewelry.

"Sorry about that," she says. "This is some experimental two-way encrypting rigamarole. I can't say I understand much of it, but in light of recent events I feel we're better erring on the side of caution."

"Guess you won't be wanting that tasting menu then?" You half-joke.

She pauses in the process of lifting a wine bottle from somewhere beside her seat. "You know what?" She says. "I'll want one. Or more. Just a whole bunch of tea, give me the works. I'll pay you double for some caffeinated shit. I know a bunch who'll need to keep good and sober for the next however long. I know _I'll_ be locking my vintages for a while, and for my own good."

She looks down at her bottle with rueful longing, and then takes a hearty swig off of it.

"As for _you_ , my Lord," she says, when she puts her bottle down. "Remember that little planet? Which they were talking about maybe assigning to you? With the mushrooms and—"

"Well _shit_ ," you say, unsurprised but emphatic.

"Forget it," she says.

"I had my suspicions at—"

"Forget _all_ about it," she says.

"I guessed as much—"

"Hun, you haven't guessed _enough_. I'm telling you to forget it, not in a give-up-on-plans way, but in a forget-it-ever-existed way. Because it doesn't."

"So the Empress elected to—"

She raises her bottle again, and you shut up as sure as if she had told you to. The swig she takes is long and goes down so heavy in her throat that it aches in yours.

"The Empress is a whirlwind of _wrath_ , Lord Wrathtor," she says, setting the bottle back down with too heavy a hand. Her face is grim. "It was not… it was not her _design_. It isn't destroyed. It isn't conquered. Reports are conflicted, it's a mess. But it's no longer _there_."

Her eyes glitter a bit, you assume from the drink; but the rest of her doesn't betray a hint of soporific. She's looking beyond you now, beyond the screen, as if picturing the imperial tableau just ahead of her own seat.

"It's been… a long time," she says softly. "Since we last faced a challenge as an Empire. And even then, it was just that. A pastime for Her Imperious Condescension."

She focuses back onto you, sharp.

"They _yanked_ the world out from under Imperial Vanguard, Wrathtor, like one yanks a decorative textile from under the cups and plates of a nourishment plateau. And just like in the aftermath of a successful trick, the breakables and the cutleries remained behind, jostled but _whole_."

She waves the bottle in the air, as if motioning towards a work of art.

"Where there was once a backward, primitive and barely inhabited planetoid, there are now only floating occupation bases encased in perfect little atmospheric pockets. Thousands are soon to be culled for this embarrassment, but as far as we know? Most of the staff is still kicking in there. And the worst thing is, we don't fucking know who they _are_. They spat in our face and we don't even know the shape of their lips."

"The—" you stammer— "the little Prophet, wasn't it—"

She suddenly bursts into laughter, undignified and uncontrolled; she bends to the side and almost spills her bottle.

"Oh!" She says, in her sudden mirth. "Don't even say that, you poor kid, by god. You don't even _know_. But oh, that thing," she says, apparently calming down, "the current guess is it wasn't an _actual_ native, but that's all we got. It's gone, of course, along with the planet. They left trolls and troll buildings behind, but not a single salamander, at least according to reports. Not a blanket or mushroom, or even the dead bodies being autopsied. One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone and so was gravity." She pauses for a bit. "I know this bit because a mediculler acquaintance nicked himself and bitched online until the gag order caught up with his color. So it might turn out the body just floated off out of his reach. He's that kind of idiot."

You glance at Solace, and she nods wearily at you, slumped elbows over knees. The precog confirms it, then. An alien power. You turn back to Wildsteel.

"There'll be war," you guess.

"As soon as we find the culprits, yes," she says, leaning back on her chair like she can't wait to hit the coon. "But I tell you, Wrathtor, we're in for a bad time." She sighs deeply, and picks her bottle back up. " _Evergrow_ is in charge."

" _Fuck_ ," you say, with feeling.

She raises the bottle in solemn agreement, then takes a short swig. "I mean," she says with a sigh, "I'd be glad of it in any other circumstances, it means the Condesce is getting tired of his shit. She just sent him to prove his actual worth, and since he has none he's as good as dead. But until _that_ gets sorted out, he'll be commanding all our forces, right at the start of this campaign, and Wrathtor? I think this other empire is going to be _tricky_. They already caught us flat-footed when it really should have been the other way around. And now we're losing the window of opportunity for an effective counter-strike, right at the beginning, because _Fucking Evergrow_."

She shakes her head sadly.

"This will be a mess of a conquest," she laments. "And so much of it could have already been avoided. Oh well. Stay sharp, Wrathtor," she sets her bottle down, starts nervously tugging her rings out. "You're not far enough from the frontline to avoid getting drafted, and your competence damns you. As for me, I'm blasting straight back to my yards. Good luck."

"Thanks," you say dumbly, and the screen goes dark.

Well… war. Vaguely serious war, even. You can't say you've taken part in a serious campaign in the whole of your career. Quelling the odd revolt, sure, but apart from that it's mostly bounties and commissions. Officially speaking, your duties have always involved more of the cleaning up than the breaking down. You wonder which of your contacts have been active in actual campaigns and whether they have tips to give—

Your portable device vibrates, and you don't even have time to ponder ignoring it before Pascal— and bless him for waking up all the way— raises the alarm.

Talcha has lost track of Zaphir (mother _fuck_ , she _promised_ ).

He also lost track of Saldor.

#

Your psi ripples through the ship and bounces off every mind you recognize with a single message: _Zaphir, Saldor, location report_.

You sense your crew bounce into immediate action like a furious anthill, leaving their gathering points— the lowblood garrison here, the meal area there, the ablution stalls, the communal rest blocks— and scattering into adjacent hallways; somehow you manage to keep the bridge crew on their seats even as you stumble outside, mouth gone dry.

Pascal sends you updates from Talcha, their last known location, predicted routes. But Talcha _was_ in the middle of a processing intensive operation— he paused it, of course, but just the pausing takes more processing power, he's slowed down and overwhelmed— you can but direct groups to confirm a couple places while you clatter up and down stairs; this place is empty, that place is empty, he vanished from here, she vanished from there.

You try to pick Zaphir's mind out from the panicked morass, and— something pushes you out, a small pressure, a tiny thumb. You turn a tight corner and shoot like a bullet towards the garden, the whole ship converging in the wake of your broadcasted certainty, and faster than you expected you slide to a halt at the mouth of a crossing and see it: a grate on the floor, twisted and punched through, and further on Saldor, the twisted motherfucker.

Across from him Olvier slides into view, dirt-speckled with a spade in hand, and you take in the tableau almost at the same time as he does: Saldor standing in the middle of the narrow sub-corridor connecting two main paths (surveillance is focused on their _exits_ , Pascal all but shouts in your head), pants pulled down his hips, clutching Zaphir by the hair.

" _Open up, you little bitch!_ " The bastard shrieks, shaking her head like she's a recalcitrant jar, and messiahs bless, she's got her mouth and eyes squished full closed—

You're still absorbing all that, but Olvier has clearly seen all he needs to see; he raises his spade and jumps in blade first, and Saldor pulls out his gun with his free hand, broken pinky and all, and shoots—

You jump as he turns to aim, your scythe sliding easy into your hands, and slice his bitch head off like you should of done from the start.


	15. Chapter 15

Saldor's head flies off, bounces with a thud against the wall; your hygiene corporal slides into view and gives it a fantastic kick before it hits the floor.

Olvier is sprawled down at your feet.

Other people are approaching, there are angry noises, mournful ones. You stand back, almost let go of your scythe. You snap out of— whatever it is— and captchalogue it properly.

Olvier is— alive. You think. He looks like it. His chest is rising and dropping pretty fast. You look for blood. You can't make sense of what you're seeing. Pascal can't either.

Other people are kneeling around him, and they look like they know what they're doing. You turn around and stumble the other way.

Zaphir is standing in the middle of a hovering, worried circle, her eyes and mouth still firmly closed. You think you see Frigna among the gentle souls babbling in soothing tones.

You fall to your knees among them. "I killed him," you tell her. "He's dead. No longer a problem."

She still doesn't move. Her face is shiny on spots, slick, the color of those smears not _hers_.

You decaptchalogue a bottle of— of Faygo, fuck, what the hell. What the hell are you doing. All at once you suddenly wake up from a weird trance and notice you were about to… to wash Saldor off Zaphir's face with highblood soda.

Actually, yeah. You know what.

That's the best use two liters of faygo have ever been put to.

You uncork the bottle and baptize your little girl with a rare, one-of-a-kind, Grand-Highblood blessed, authenticated bottle of Strawberry Faygo.

She shivers as the fizzy soda hits her forehead; you pick a tip of your half-cape, daub at her face, rub over her eyelids. Wash them again. Her hair will be a sticky disaster, and so will her clothes, and this spot on the floor.

You wipe her face, wash it again, repeat it until the bottle is gone; then you say "There we go", touch your lips to her sugared forehead, and immediately burst into tears.

And then you have to get a grip on your shit and— be the boss, as it is. You wrap Zaphir in your cape and hitch her up on the crook of your arm and tell the cleaners to stop manhandling Saldor's head, and then to clean and fix it up as best as can be done, because…

Because you gotta be having _something_ to show the Spiceler. This fucker shot at Olvier. They're carrying him off, gingerly, on two wheeled meal presentation platforms tied together, and you don't yet know how bad it's being or if he'll be living, but you feel it clear in your soul that you owe this little to the old troll at least— to have the final say on the trash this trash left behind.

Sundra goes off to begin the terrible task of drafting that particular explanation, while Frigna and the other hygiene staff gather around the corpse, already decaptchaloguing cleaning implements and containers. You watch blankly as a group detaches, wheeling the crumpled body away in a baggy plasticky cart. Presumably to the guest room. It's as good a place as any to present him.

The much-abused head wobbles inside the cart, somewhere below the oozing stump of the neck. You can see the horns dancing to and fro. One of them is broken halfway down.

Pascal suddenly shows up and takes you by the shoulders and turns you around and pushes you along off to somewhere. But it looks like the Empire ain't be stopping even if your thinkpan did; halfway to wherever you get a summons notice, to be at the coordinates this-and-that at oh-what-o'clock Imperial Time to present yourself at the blah-blah-blah, and that's less than two nights from now so you stop at your block to set Zaps down on your desk chair, and then you get another cape from your wardrobifier and hang that around her shoulders too. She kinda clutches at them without looking at you, but then you have to hurry to the bridge and organize shit, or stand there while Pascal organizes shit and gives orders out through your mouth, and if he walks in to sort you out his brain goes all glitched out and empty too—

You're a little more self-possessed after a while, at least. The Spiceler's crew acknowledges Sundra's apologetic message, and you initiate a back-and-forth of statuses that force you to actually go and face up to the damage on your gardener.

The shot burned straight through his gut. Your medicullers and lethalchemist are working on him together, trying to figure out how much of his intestines they'll have to tug out for sewing, how many loops got ripped, nevermind the infection, or his shit oozing out—

You get back to the bridge and find a focus you never knew you had on battle supplies.

At the approach of morning, you drag yourself to your block and dump your armor on the floor piece by piece as you walk in. Zaphir has left your cape and is huddled in her coon, you find; you touch her sticky forehead in agonized anxiety, not knowing what kind of monster you want to throw yourself at first, and you have a miserable few hours of sleep before you pull yourself up and back to the bridge in disgust, and push Pascal pointedly out.

The Spiceler's staff has arranged a visit for the late night, and it becomes your anchor as you hit up contacts and try to figure out what to expect for this next mission, as you make purchases and arrange deliveries, as you push down sudden gripping fists of anxiety weighing your chest. Some of the off-duty crew gathers up outside the bridge entrance, out of sight but present, and make themselves useful as opportunities come up; the kitchen sergeant sends up a carton of dulce-de-leche and a spoon, and you put a good dent in it as you go.

You're liable to be put in charge of a couple more ships, a flotilla or something. What are you going to do with more ships? How are you going to manage that crew? How do you make sure they're not a bunch of assholes? Can you opt out? But Reapneck from the secret board just laughs at you, then looks like he wants to cry. You go through your latest tea orders, try to expedite that shit, because clearly there won't be time for shipping out stuff in the foreseeable future. What can you send the Lady? You promised some shit for the Lady, caffeinated even. You could do with caffeine.

The dulce-de-leche kept you sane, but eventually it gives you a cramp in the guts; you run back to your block to sort that out, and after an embarrassingly gassy dump you step back in your block, still toweling your hands off, and peek anxiously at Zaphir again.

She's awake in the coon. You give her your leftover dulce-de-leche, and brush her hair back.

"How you holding up?" you ask her, then kick yourself inside for a dumbshit. She makes a noncommittal sound, shrugs, looks off in the distance; you brush her sticky hair back again, and again, try not to cry; you want to kick things. You want to go into the guest room and kick Saldor's head around until it bursts like the rotten melon it is. You want to fistfight god.

"You can go in the kitchen," you say, still brushing her hair back ineffectually, "he's not around anymore, you can walk around, you can visit everyone again. If you— if you don't want to walk, if you're scared still, the— the transportalizer is still there. Okay?"

She nods, her eyes staring light-years away, and you walk away before you do something supremely stupid, like rant and rave at the ceiling. You walk up to your coon instead, where Pascal, too, is awake and huddled and unhappy, and you lean in and drop your head on his shoulder— for all the good it'll do you or even him, who hates physical touch. But you stay there until you get a crick on your neck, and then you stride back out and towel the sopor off your face, and by the time you're back on the bridge your facepaint is an ugly smear.

And then you remember the thing about your facepaint, and you slam dunk your towel into a trash receptacle and fall down into your captain seat, head in your hands.

#

There's a good two hours to go until the Spiceler's visit by the time you hit your shits threshold and go get yourself ready. You're already stumbling to your block before the thought is even finished in your mind, but what else is there to do? It's night, and there's a crisis, and the Empire is in some shit too. A troll's gotta choose what to care about, else he be going nuts, and you're well on your way.

Pascal is asleep, at least, a good actual deep sleep, and thank fuck. Your armor is still scattered about— it's only slightly spattered, but you have half a mind to dump it out of airlock, and Saldor's remains besides; you deliberately ignore them and turn around.

You're so deep in your thoughts you don't even get what you see at first, but it's just Zaphir, standing stock still in the middle of your block.

"Hey," you mumble uncertainly. Her hair is weird still— sticky upwards and around her cheeks, didn't she… didn't she wash up yet? You haven't either, but…

"Hey," she tells you back, serious as you've ever seen, solemn. Her ams are held up to her sides, her fingers rubbing against each other in fidgeting fists.

"Did you clean up?" you ask, even though it's clear she didn't. You should have left her at the kitchens, you think. With good company. Sweets. Some pampering—

"I'm good," she says, which is an answer that doesn't make sense, and then she says "I'm ready," and you have no idea what for, even when she pushes her pants down.

Then she pulls her shirt up her neck and drops it on the floor, and she stands naked in front of you, looking upwards into your eyes, solemn and firm, her hands in little fists. "I'm ready," she repeats.

"I see," you say, through lips that are more rubber than flesh. She thinks—

You were doing so good. Everyone was doing so good. And now you feel ice flowing up from your feet and into your hands and you can't feel your face, but.

"Very well," you say, in a steady voice somehow, and walk up to her. You crouch a little as you pick her up through her underarms, out of her crumpled leg tubes; you seat her bare ass on the crook of your arm, and you walk into the ablution block. You deposit her on the bottom of the trap, and when you finally glance at her face, you're not surprised to find that it looks as numb and cold as your own.

You crank up the warm water, lean back into Pascal's mind. He woke up when— when things started happening— and now he's out your coon and crying on your desk, and you need a good cry too, by the messiahs— but not in front of her, no.

Instead you dump enough soap into the trap for massive bubbles, scrub her chest and face with the towel while the water rises up. You pile suds on top of her head, yank the sink mirror out of the wall so she can get a good look on. You shape the soap into big horns, into a ‘fro, a ball, a thumb. She smiles, tentative and awkward, and you feel your heart pump again.

You rub the soda well out of her hair, shape it into spikes, scratch behind her ears. She laughs and cranes her shoulders up in surprise. You poke her ribs and underarms for good measure, but don't overstay your welcome, just in case; then you give her the washcloth while you try to put the mirror back where it was, and although you play it up when she giggles you actually legit drop all the little bottles twice over.

You prop the mirror up on the basin, then go back to cycle the water out and rinse her.

You've got her wrapped in a towel burrito when Pascal steps in, calm as ever, unfolding a set of fresh clothes for her— the thicker set, with long sleeves and a brown undershirt. It's got her symbol properly silk-screened in. The two of you dry her off while she's still burrito-ed, use up about three towels, and help her with her undies and pants so she can keep wrapped; then you carry her out and deposit her into this pillow and cape nest Pascal arranged inside her mini-block.

She already looks so much more herself, and you're victorious and drenched from the waist up. Pascal, too, is still gross from sopor and only presentable by means of hastily equipping a fresh set of throwaway clothes; he kneels at the entrance of Zaphir's corner, gingerly, and you know it's both from worry and from him hating his own sticky skin, but it's still a sweet scene.

You feel on the back of your throat the tell-tale pressure of Pascal's thoughts, too, like a half-swallowed outburst. You know he's no good at standardized displays of affection, they feel weird and unnatural and too much like a forced lie (for him and you both, though he feels it much more keenly), but you hope he'll try something anyway— a pat on the head, maybe, since he feels too gross for hugging and Zaphir just done got cleaned, or an exchange of hand-signs— for his own sake even, not just hers— he's concentrating hard and you hope he can feel your encouragement—

"Z-zaphir," he mumbles out, and with a sudden strange frisson you remember that you haven't heard his voice, coming out of his actual mouth, in sweeps.

You pat around at your back until you find the wall, then try to lean back _real_ casual-like, because. Oh gosh, messiahs, motherfuck. You know it, you've felt it; you've gone into his head, and even spoke through his mouth.

Pascal thinks sharp like a lightning bolt, but the way from his thinkpan to his tongue is— _padded,_ in insulating rubber and slime, all of it uphill in treacherous footing, and putting ideas into sounds is hell. He can repeat things if need be, at the cost of blocking out all else; but relaying the first sentence out of three, while completely missing the other two, is often not worth the effort.

He speaks out through your mouth instead because your mind is slow but your way unimpeded, and you don't speak through his because it's an awful experience that humiliates him and hurts his ears, unused as they are to the sound. He puts himself through the exertion when he must, and you try to make sure he mustn't.

In your presence, he never has.

Zaphir is staring up at him in surprise, and she doesn't even _know_.

"We," he says, rubbing his fingertips together, sifting through the sticky path of speech, "everyone," he changes tack, and you hold your breath and do your best to not trip him up, "everyone is… in mud. It's mud. Living…"

He stares intently into the floor— blocking everything, gathering the whole of his concentration into this one ungodly task.

"We… walk, and… s-some of us. Have. Boots. But. We're all slipping… everyone is… muddy and dirty… s-so…"

He looks up, beseechingly, at her foot.

"We just!…" he flaps a hand in frustration, "we just wanted to p-pull you up. When people push you down, it's— bad and— and when we can, because— we have boots. So!"

He shakes his head vigorously.

"You don't have to. Do things. We're happy." He flaps his hands again. "We're happy already."

You're half-blinded with tears so you can't say for sure, but the blurry little shape of Zaphir slides off her mound and wraps herself around Pascal's ribs with great care.

Even a wanted hug is too much hugging for Pascal, so you make sure to snuggle him inwards only.

#

You kept on crying, through your shower and out of it and through dressing up and all during the fantabulous late lunch the kitchens sent up— the kind of silent oozy crying that puts a cramp in one's sinuses— but by golly is your soul thoroughly refreshed by the time you stand ready to receive the Spiceler's envoy, Pascal to your side and Zaphir between you.

He knows about her already, so. Enough huddling for her.

Two lanky trolls arrive first, quickly stepping down from the transportalizer and then, to your surprise, laying _another_ transportalizer in front of it, wider, flatter; its purpose is made clear when the Spiceler himself transportalizes in, flanked by his two aides— the blue secretancillary and the burgundy retainer, both with their forearms firmly raised for their ancient master to cling to.

The Spiceler shuffles at great effort and expense, slowly, to the edge of his special transportalizing platform, his companions anxiously matching every mincing step. The vanguard trolls stand at attention to the sides, staring intently. You tense despite yourself.

Then the old troll steps off with a little "oof!" and everyone breathes again.

He's wearing a dark cuirass in a deep, almost black plum, and, although it's not that big, it looks— immense— on his wizened body. The Spiceler must not have been tall in his prime, and the centuries have only shrunk him further. He's also swimming under a dark flaring cape hanging slightly crooked from his shoulder pads, and which his aides have apparently pinned to their own sides to clear the way for his, thankfully sensible, shuffling boots.

The sensible boots shuffle right up to you with a little more speed than you expected from them, and his aides hastily set his cape free.

"Oh, my _son_ ," he says, in his shaky wheezy voice, and you have this sudden panicked thought that he might drop dead right there. You offer a hand before you even know what you're doing, and he grasps it with his wrinkly, disturbing ones; to your surprise they feel very soft and dry, not weird at all.

You can only suppose that worn skin is just like any other kind of worn leather. The Spiceler's hands are certainly vintage.

His watery, vintage eyes lower to your joined hands, and then widen as they catch sight of Zaphir; his demeanor does a whole dang turnaround in the blink of an eye.

"Well, hello there!" he says, cocking his head like he hasn't a care or grief in the whole galaxy. His torso lowers about half an inch, enough to show he's making a real effort at leaning down. "Who might this little lady be?"

Zaphir stares up at him with eyes like nourishment plateaus, puts a knuckle in her mouth. "Hi," she mumbles through her finger, then strategically retreats to behind Pascal's butt.

"A clever girl, full of suspicions," the Spiceler nods wisely and emphatically. "Step back and watch, that's the ticket."

"That's being Zaphir, your Excellence," you say. "She's all skittish in these uncertain fucking times, and so are we all."

He turns to you, and his face goes back to— not to his previous anguish, but to a grim look. "So are we all," he repeats, slowly, and the hands around yours tighten with surprising strength. "Take me to my boy," he says.

You nod, and he's shuffled his way up to your side, his retainer already holding his cape up, when Pascal's brain catches you up with the obvious.

"Um," you say, hesitantly, "I got this think on that it's being kind of far for your Excellency, maybe," you add.

"Oh, I'm not so old I can't take a bracing little hike!" he flaps a hand in disdain.

Between his neck and collarbone, disappearing under his armor's padding, you spot this weird, deep hollow, like a crevice into his torso. Something about it is deeply wrong and unsettling; between you and Pascal, _someone_ wonders if it means his lung is collapsed, and then you both regret ever thinking at all.

"Where is he?" asks his secretancillary, in a hurry. This guy _definitely_ knows what's up with the creepy torso hole, sweet motherfucking messiahs.

"The— the Gardens," you stutter. "My medicullers had him sent there soon as his patching was done. That's… that's where we're doing our resting up and the like," you add quickly. "Under Fakiya's watch where the light's warm and nice."

"Your Excellency, why not save your strength for a stroll through Lord Wrathtor's famed garden?" the secretancillary turns to his master with a bright, guileless smile. "He will be glad to show you around."

You fucking hate being told what you're feeling and what to do, but in the circumstances you go along with it and nod emphatically to the back of the Spiceler's head. The old man is chuckling. You feel like a transparent idiot. You cannot imagine that anyone else in this tableau does _not_.

"Your Excellency, if I may be so bold—" his retainer steps forward, his master's cape draped on his forearm. "Olvier will surely be eased by the sight of your visage at its best."

The Spiceler's hand flinches around yours, a single, short, tensing spasm, and just like that, the argument is over. And how could it not? In person, the burgundy retainer oozes such confidence and self-possession, even the Spiceler is bound to feel like a wiggler.

You turn to the two vanguard trolls. "The garden isn't having its own transportalizer," you tell them. "There's being a hub on the garden's floor, though, and walking astern a-ways you'll—"

"Wait!" Zaphir bellows out, jumping from behind Pascal like some very clumsy illusionistrangler. "Wait, wait! I've got a transportalizer!"

"Yes," you tell her, soothingly, mostly because she gave your pump a start and a half. "That's okay—"

"It's portable!" She proclaims, proudly, trotting to the doors. "I'll take the kitchen one to the garden gate and then I'll bring the—"

And that's about all you hear from her before the gate slides close at her retreating back.

"Oh!" gasps the Spiceler, patting your arm with his free hand. "She's so lively— I'm so glad."

"She's like to be killing me with fright sometimes," you confess, and he laughs.

"That's how you know a child's got it together!" he says, and then sobers up. "But really— I was told that, that _element_ … tracked her down to—"

He stops. You nod. A heavy, awkward air descends.

"…but she looks recovered," he says, eventually.

"By the grace of the Messiahs, she is," you say thickly. "Oh, your Excellency, it's being all up and bitter in my throat to be saying this, but it must be told, you must be knowing; remember that first call, when you were telling me about Olvier, and you said you wish you could be saying you were trusting him with your life?"

"Yes," he whispers, and squeezes your hand.

You squeeze back— lightly, because for all you know his bones are having the strength and texture of putty.

"Don't be wishing no more," you tell him, eyes burning. "When he came for Zaps he came with spade in hand. He came ready to fuckin' throw down, and it cost him, but he did it. You can be saying it with pride. Olvier didn't say a peep for his own skin, but he fought for Zaphir, and he'd fight for you— I know it in my gut." You sniff long and deep through already much abused sinuses. "…for what it's being worth."

He tugs your hand closer, pats it light as a feather. "It really is bitter…" He says, hoarse and soft. "Bitter and sweet. But thank you, son; I can say it with pride now."

You nod, awkward. He pats your hand a little more firmly, nods to himself.

"His mind was always exceptionally fragile," he says, eventually. "We never could recover the child he once was. It was more than merely buried too deep, see…" he sighs. "Whenever my psychics probed him for memories, all our progress— much or little as it was— would fall apart. Over and over, a healing child would revert to a catatonic child; the subtlest, most skilled touch was as a hammer to porcelain."

A chill crawls up both yours and Pascal's back.

"We were forced to cease our attempts, and raise him from a much-blanked slate," he continues. "But a wise troll once said that where fools see weakness the clever see strength. And a mind that may not be pried open may instead be filled with valuables. I would not have trusted Olvier with my life, son, and I said as much; but I trusted him with my everything else. For the time he was mine, he guarded my secrets. And I hoped…" his voice warbles, softens into a whisper, and he squeezes your hand again, looks up at you. "I hoped that he would guard yours, too. In time."

His eyes well up, and his secretancillary steps forward, kerchief in hand. You don't know what to say; you kind of want to wipe your eyes too, and to freak out a bit about all the mind stuff you blithely did with poor Olvier, but right then the door slides open and Zaphir toddles back in, the big disk of the transportalizer held awkwardly at her front like a full-body shield.

"Mother _fuck_ , Zaps, don't be holding the thing— what if your _hands_ — you have a deck for this!!" You sputter in dismay.

"Here," she says instead, strained but clearly not giving a shit, "now you just port right to the door, and the garden is gonna be right there," and then she lets go of the platform and it clangs to the floor with a sound like your blood vessels exploding in your brain, rotating like a tossed coin, and she has the gall to dust her hands off like it's being a job all well and done.

"Thank you, my little lady," the Spiceler says, calm as all that, and makes a quick sign you barely spot; his two trolls step forward, inspect Zaphir's transportalizer, activate it (oh thank god, she didn't _actually_ carry it all the way here while it was turned on) and jump through.

A handful of seconds and they were back, laying the other flat transportalizer down again, and it's your turn to slowly walk the Spiceler up to and through it.

To your highly anxious amusement it turns out that Zaphir had set her transportalizer _right_ against the doors, at least according to the circle of recently shaped dust it left behind. But the Spiceler's vanguard had better sense, and after moving hers to the side they set theirs a close but still respectable distance away. You double check the temperatures and light; you had them lowered a little more than usual for the sake of this visit. Pascal shows the numbers to the retainer at your back. He nods in approval.

The Spiceler lets go of your hand as the gates slide open. "It's indelicate of me to eschew your guidance," he says, apologetically, "but… I'd like to talk to my child in private, if possible. Just for a little bit."

"No, I mean," you mumble, off-guard, "it's perfectly understandable… of course." You step back, let the secretancillary and retainer return to their positions.

The vanguard trolls have already gone inside and located the rhododendron with Olvier— and Melita, too, actually; you see them talk for a bit, watch her stand up from her recliner and come walking off.

The Spiceler has made it a few feet inside by the time she reaches him. "Oh, my dear, did I dislodge you?" you hear him say in surprise.

"It's no problem," she assures him.

"I'm so sorry, daughter."

"My legs are just fine, so walking isn't an issue," she says, calm and somehow not the least bit intimidated.

Her arm is still on a sling, with knuckles visibly swollen, so you think the Spiceler's worry is warranted. Nevermind the migraines she's been having, either. But one of the vanguard trolls brings out a lounging chairs for her, and stays behind as the gates slide closed, which you appreciate.

"How is he?" You mumble at Melita once she's made herself comfortable, with Zaphir on her lap.

She makes a complicated face. "He refused the soporific potions," she says, "so he's in a lot of pain, that's for sure. I'm amazed he's even awake."

"Why refuse—?" you ask in surprise.

She shrugs. "He did try to tell me about some person he knew who got it worse and took it…. but I think this friend didn't make it, so I'm not sure what he's angling for." She pats Zaphir's head with her good hand. "I don't think even he knew what his point was. He's plenty delirious."

You press your lips together, nod in acknowledgement. If Olvier expected a visit, he might have just wanted to keep sober. On the other frond, you can't imagine having the presence of mind to expect fuckall when fresh out of having your intestines stitched back together and lumped back in. And you can't imagine the Spiceler running a medicullery unity sans paincullers or letting someone die without. Maybe the Spiceler has better pain-diminishing technology? If Olvier is delirious, he might not even get what the potions are for, other than they're not what he knows from his old ship. And he doesn't remember Alternia and its own medicullery practices, if you got the Spiceler right.

Will the Spiceler take him back in? If he does have better technology it would only be the correct thing to do, for Olvier's sake. How will you transfer him? Do they have an even wider transportalizing platform? Or will Olvier have to stand on his feet? That sounds terrible for his wound, actually. Oh, speaking off.

You shake your head— actually you accidentally shake Pascal's as you're disengaging, but he takes it in stride— and ask the vanguard troll if he would like to talk to the mediculler who did Olvier. The guy looks happy enough, and Pascal calls her in; she arrives fairly quickly, and the two are barely started talking shop when the garden doors slide back open, and the Spiceler and his aides carefully mince their way out.

Poor old dude has definitely been crying. But he looks well enough other than that, almost cheered; it's hard for you to tell if he's putting on a face for the onlookers or what, but when he shuffles up to you he does so with almost a bounce to his step.

"Yours is _such_ a lovely garden, my child," he says, grasping your hand again. "I'm so glad to see my seeds and earth put to such skillful use. And your rhododendron shaded me with a leaf— you'll have to tell me all about that one later!"

And then he squeezes your hand, speaks more soberly. "Olvier would very much like to talk to you," he says, gravely. "About something very much personal, I say."

It's your turn for a private convo, Pascal thinks. You nod, try to look very grave and conspiratorial. The aides fetch him back up; they maneuver around in lockstep, and eventually join the medical conversation by Melita. You hear your mediculler describe using filtered honey on the surgical hole, and something about bubbles.

Pascal gives you a metaphorical poke in the ribs, and you snap out of your misty funk. You walk into the garden, slap the doors closed at your back.

After everything that's been going on, the place looks strange and crowded— like a part of you was expecting that old dinky collection of empty planters and jury-rigged lighting, back when Fakiya was the most interesting feature in the block, lying half-dead with booze and doloritos and not a shit to give to the universe. How many sweeps has it been?

So much has changed, but you don't feel different at all. Give or take a couple bad experiences and a Zaphir, the Eudora Kalhil who showed Visegrip around is the same guy fresh off his Ordeals is the same guy mucking around a lawnring is the same guy being called "son" and "child" by an ailing ancient seadweller. Maybe that's what's got your pan tripping in time; so much has changed, and you haven't.

You wonder if you have some sort of obligation— to the Empire, to the Messiahs— to become someone else. But even then, despite everything, despite your failings and decisions good and bad and despite not feeling at all like an adult… you're still plenty fine with who you are.

You're fine with yourself, and, you notice with a surge of pissed-offness, you're not fine with _everything else_. And having hit this little epiphany, you nod to yourself and walk up to Fakiya's Rhododendron, and Olvier's recliner underneath.

He looks so bad.

You're emphatically not fine with that.

"Hey kid," you mutter, almost afraid a loud sound will blow him away. His face is sunken from the blood loss, eyes set deep in darkened rings, and his eyelids look paper-thin; his forehead and upper lip are freshly beaded with sweat. He's definitely in pain. He really should be taking the soporifics.

You glance at his belly, but he's wearing a sensible, clean shirt and you dare not tug it up.

"Lord Wrathtor," he whispers suddenly, and you look back at him to see his head roll to the side, his thin eyelids blink up. You crouch down to his level.

"You did good," you tell him, soft as you can, lay a hand on his. "Zaphir is safe. She's running around all up and full of mischief, making us wish she'd stay put and all that."

His lips tug up a little.

"But you're looking all like as to being shit warmed over, my dude," you add, forcing up a playful little grin. "She wants to be seeing you, but that face's gonna put a damper on her whimsy, like as not. You gotta be drinking up that good shit, okay?" You pat his hand. "You get me, my Brolvier?"

His smile widens feebly, and you think you see a nod. "You gonna be taking up the tough trolls' booze?" You press on, affect an action movie kind of accent.

"Later," says Olvier, finally. "Later…"

"That's my bro," you say, encouragingly, and then find yourself distracted by a strange bobbing square floating at the edge of your sight.

He's got a captchalogue card in his other hand, raised waveringly toward you.

You steady that hand, then take the card in confusion.

"For you," he whispers, blinks slowly. His eyes stare far and away in the distance. "It is… a secret. Very important." He takes a careful, shallow breath. "It's danger," his voice is low enough to barely catch. "I'm sorry. Thank you…"

He looks like he's this close to fainting straight up, so you captchalogue the card in one of your own and lay a soothing hand on his damp forehead.

"No worries, kid," you tell him. His sweaty forehead is super gross, poor fucker. You dig up a kerchief to dry it up a little, and after some hesitation (how do you say bye to a delirious fainting dude who may be dying?) you turn around and leave the garden.

"He says he'll take the paincullers," you tell your mediculler as soon as you pass the threshold. "He's sweating like a motherfucker, too, gotta see about that hydration."

"At once, lord," she says without missing a beat, even though you kind of belatedly noticed you interrupted her talk with the Spiceler's retinue. She glances to one of the vanguard trolls. "I see that intravenous injector is already seeing use," she tells him in rueful amusement, then bows to the Spiceler before striding through the doors.

You blink at her retreating back in confusion, while Pascal fills you in: the Spiceler determined it best to not move Olvier, and instead provided the ship with some curious medicullery implements to aid in his treating. There was an exchange of manuals and reports while you dithered in the garden.

You don't know what to make of that other than "cool", so you push it out of your mind and turn to the Spiceler.

"Your Excellency, the culprit's effects are untouched," you tell him, gravely, then kick yourself for not leading it in. "And, uh, his body is mostly recognizable. They are yours to do as you see fit."

"I appreciate your consideration, my son," he tells you, then twists his already heavy-tipped and wrinkled nose. "I don't want any of it. Saldor is dead, and his husk is just that. As for his trash…" He flaps a disdainful hand. "I doubt some whelp who made his luck sucking up to Evergrow would have anything I could possibly care for. No, sonny, they're yours, for what little they're worth. Your people were more deeply wronged than mine."

He doesn't turn to look at Melita and Zaphir, but you guess at what he means anyway. "Thank you, Excellency," you tell him.

He beckons with a knotty finger. "Make sure you sanitize anything you don't sell," he says before you take your second step towards him, and then laughs a wheezy, bitter laugh.

"Littlest I can do against cosmic pollution is scrubbing shit before I toss it," you retort, and grin despite yourself.

There wasn't much left to the visit after that; Melita goes back to her lie-down in the garden, and you escort the lot back on that bracing little stroll the Spiceler had been hankering for. The old troll babbles all the way to the transportalizing hub, giving you tips about dealing with the politics of whatever society he thinks you're part of, which seem to change from one moment to the next.

Once in the hub, he does sober up; and grasping both your fronds on his he says, "Don't worry evermuch about Evergrow, my son. Don't tell him if he doesn't ask; and if he does ask, _deflect_. If he had a point of contact with that lad, we wouldn't be having this leisure talk right now. Whatever game was being played was not one he cared to follow."

His secretancillary nods behind the Spiceler, and then looks meaningfully at Pascal. Details will be forthcoming, then, you both assume.

The vanguard trolls prepare the special transportalizers to depart from the hub, rather than the bridge, and you stand back and let the aides take their place at the Spiceler's side. But before they even get in position, Zaphir suddenly steps up, tugging a finger nervously, and says: "Um!"

The Spiceler turns to her curiously.

"Can I…" she hesitates, looking up at him with clear trepidation, and then appears to steel herself. "Can I pet your hair?"

The Spiceler blinks, and then adjusts his legs, leans down an inch or so, cocking his head so as to display one of his white tufts; Zaphir goes up on tiptoes, raises her hand.

You watch her pet the soft, soft bleach-white cotton-candy hair and are _so_ jealous.

#

It's late, you have a summons to attend to this next evening, you just herded Zaphir into her coon, and you have a captchalogue card burning a hole in another captchalogue card.

It sure is seeming like you're about to get privy to some serious motherfucking secrets.

Pascal cleans hisself up, puts on some comfy flannels. You hand him the card and go do your own ablutions. While you're busy, Pascal determines that it's one of those high-security cards you got way back when, for the secret laboratormentory. It's already unlocked, and the content viewer displays a folder.

He holds off on decaptchaloguing it until you're done.

You dim the lights to a nice comfy level. Zaphir seems to be good and conked, and you don't want that to be changing no matter what you see. So, instead of sitting at your desk, you and Pascal hunker down shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor against the wall, where Talcha's camera will be seeing you but not picking the folder's contents.

Pascal rests his head against your shoulder and closes his eyes— one pair of ganders is more than enough to read.

You open the card.

The folder pops out on your knee, along with the many pages of a letter. A real, hand-written letter; the writing is huge and fat, very deliberate, and it says _to my dear Eudora Kalhil, L. Wrathtor_ on top.

You can believe this is the hand of the Spiceler, easy.

_To my dear Eudora Kalhil, L. Wrathtor_ , you read again. _At the eve of my dear Olvier's departure to your vessel I will have entrusted to him this card, and the contents therein. To this boy I am deputizing a great degree of my own personal authority upon a very specific, very secret matter, and the moment this letter makes it to your hands will be the moment in which he elects to trust you, fully and without reservations, with my life and my future, and that of anyone and everyone I ever knew. For you see, the contents of this folder could destroy me; and if you choose to do so you need but to deliver this folder, sealed and untouched, to a direct agent under Her Imperious Condescension's retinue._

You snap the seal on the folder, then go back to the letter.

_But if instead you accept this burden, and a burden it is, then I will be glad to entrust upon you my true legacy, beyond spices, beyond plantations, beyond planets or gold or any such paltry material things. It is a legacy I inherited in my own pupahood, back in the turbulent days of the Great Rebellion— when the bitter, bronze-tinged draught of defeat came so close to the Condesce's lips, she scattered our kind upon the cosmos that no one else could pose a challenge to her rule._

_To know of this rebellion is to forfeit life. If you deliver this folder, make sure this letter is not attached to it._

_I am surely approaching the end of my nights, and this and a thousand other secrets— barely sampled in this folder— will want for a new, young Guardian. I have found no candidate more suitable than you. Because to ensure the longevity of this knowledge, you must be stable and staid, and above all suspicion; and you must also seem boring, truly and deeply boring such that the explosive greed of your peers disdain of you. And above all else, you must not die. You must not be destroyed, at all costs. And you must be ready to, if need be, if you ever somehow find yourself in this position, dine at the Condesce's elbow with a smile in your face and flattery in your lips, while sitting on top of her most hated and most shameful secrets; for these secrets may be copied or hidden for safekeeping, but one such copy should never leave your person, for any reason._

_Should you take up this burden, you shall be the keeper of the memory of a thousand rebellions past, and the collector of the memory of a thousand rebellions future. And you must never, ever be part of them. That is our own bitter draught, to continuously sample until the foretold times; until the Empire is no more, and our burden free to be sung upon every solar wind._

_Yours in this silent battle,_

_Cardam Tarrak_

So the sour-sough thing was just an excuse, after all. You'd wondered. They probably already have that soil.

They just wanted to get to know you.

If you were a jerk to Olvier and sunk into his pan, he'd fall apart and you'd get nothing. If you stole this card from his twitching hands, you'd have no way of opening it. If they were really, really through, it'd be trapped just in case you tried.

It's pretty ruthless, but. You guess the Spiceler is in a hurry.

You open the folder.

The first thing you see is a paper with a red symbol in it, and the Spiceler's fat letters underneath:

_Congratulations! To but lay eyes upon this sign is treason against the Empire. Behold the Sign of the Signless! ___


	16. Chapter 16

The early evening sees you kneeling down in front of Pascal, eyes closed, surrounded by scattered crayon drawings. Your face is tacky with Reapneck's bitchin' recipe. Pascal is applying it. You're evaluating through his eyes. Zaphir is churning out design after design.

Everything is white base from your eyes down, and you're fucking stumped.

"How about some fairy wings?" says Zaphir, holding a sheet up for Pascal. "Like your eyes are the top of the wings and the bottom of the wings are around your nose and there are little stars here for magic fairy dust. Or put on stardust!"

"Aw, shit, I love the wing idea," you say with feeling, once you translate her attempt. "I want it, fuck, but some people really won't like me if I do."

You can't be keeping a low profile no more, not in this time of impending conquest, not if you're going to— to inherit the Spiceler's burden. You were willing to do it from the start, for his and Olvier's sake, but…

But you read the little sample of secrets. You and Pascal both, far into the day, learning yourself the abridged version of a couple rebellions past. And then you sat there together in silent awe, not at how heretical it was all being, but at how heretical you already were to begin with, deep down.

None of it felt like a surprise. None of those anti-hemospectrum, anti-conquest tenets felt new. It was like being reminded of things you were already knowing from long ago, but then done forgot.

You've been drifting through the cosmos aimlessly, and now you have a calling, and you oughta take it seriously as fuck.

So you can't put fairy wings on your face in case some chucklefuck associates it with that Summoner dude.

"Shit ain't fair, man," you mumble to yourself as Pascal experimentally colors your cheekbones hollow with black. It's a pretty common facepaint element, pretty safe, he argues without much heart, and you agree; they're there and that's all you can say about it.

You feel weird and stupid. You kinda wanna just go with some generic scary face bullshit, but on the other hand you're already going to be lying about pretty much everything for the rest of your life, so… the less bullshit you present upfront, the less upkeep, right? A face you can't own feels like it would be a big fucking tell.

Pascal focuses on your mouth next, and you already know straight away that you can't abide by a huge fucking smile. That just ain't being you, you're not like a cackles-hugely kind of guy, you're more a straight-troll maybe, and Pascal chuckles in your head and thinks of a straight line thinner than your lips, and you're like go for it man. It's an aesthetic, for sure.

Between your under-brow, the cheek hollows and the thin lips you think you have something going, but you sure don't know what; and half your face still feels damn empty. Pascal thinks tear tracks? And then you both dismiss it outright. You ain't sad, you're just subtle.

Then Zaphir kneels by Pascal and takes one long studying look at your face before dipping a finger in the black and peppering you with unsteady little dots.

You let out a little huff of laughter. "Well, now _that's_ aesthetic too," you say. Pascal immediately joins in, and between the two of them you soon look like you came down with something contagious; then you rub some paste on your fingers and stamp some handprints on them, and everyone gets a nice laugh out of it.

Pascal feels he got an idea, though, and you taste the half-formed image on his mind while you wash off; it ain't bad. You kneel back in front of him while he finger-paints you an appropriate Imperial Facemask and, with your thin lips and your cheek hollows alternating black and white and some angular shit following your contours and some strategic dots, you look pretty damn sleek in this abstract kinda way.

You feel damn cool in this face, and if that's not how a face is supposed to feel then you don't wanna know. You take a selfie and send it to your crew group.

Time to get dressed and ready. You got shit to do before you go to war.

#

First in the list is being fucking flabbergasted by the realization that, technically speaking, you've been commanding other ships all along.

So, well, there's this station under your jurisdiction, with a garrison and buzzfliers and shit, and now you learn that they're apparently all yous? Like, they weren't on rental when you called them? So when you were putting down strife on Zeta-Caprese or whatever and they kept asking you for what to do, you weren't just giving tips to a scared bunch of newbies? When you organized the lot and got them all in a proper formation and then out of there whole, that was your actual job??

You sit there in astonishment, while Pascal also sits there in astonishment, but at you. How do you miss that? How the _fuck_ do you miss that? We share a brain! Well the same way you missed me not knowing that, my dude, what can I say? You literally commanded them. I thought they needed help!! No wonder Reapneck was crying, fuck. Holy shit.

So you have, uh, ten little buzzfliers, also a blueblood dude with his own ship who's yours to order around but who's been doing his own shit all this time on account of you being a fucking dumbass apparently, and you and Pascal have been mentally hollering at each other for about half an hour as you take stock of your chattels or whatever, but hey, at least Pascal kept that dude up-to-date on your personal ship maintenance standards, also that was your job and they weren't actually friends, which is what you had assumed, and now you're back to mental hollering like two loons.

After all the drama and tension this shit is upright hilarious. You have to, like, be a proper leader _leadering_ things now? How are you even gonna do that? How can you possibly deal with any of that.

Please stay with me when your time comes, you think pitifully— not at Pascal directly, but he picks it up anyway.

He doesn't think back with words, only with certainty. That's enough for you.

After recovering from that motherfucking bomb, you head on over to the "deck". Technically speaking, in the ship's map, the deck is now your garden, but being as it's full of plants and also usually harboring convalescent crew members, actual deck things such as gatherings and stuff are held at the second floor meal distribution block, with the tables put away.

This time there's one table left, so you can stand on it.

You're gonna be doing a Speech. And also break in your new face.

"Nice, Lord," Galiom raises a High for you to Five as soon as you walk in, and you hit that righteous palm as you walk across.

Once you've done clambered on top of that table you take a good look at your people— the bridge techies, the kitchen staff, the cleaning and maintenance people, your medicullers and personnel managers, half the helmsman staff, the cameras for Talcha and the other half of his people, your on-board squad of cavalreapers…

God, there are so many people. Messiahs only know how, you managed to assemble and retain this quality bunch for all these sweeps. Maybe… maybe that's kind of how it'll go for even bigger, future bunches— you go and pick them one by one, give 'em the right amount of water, the right intensity of warmth, the right wavelength of light, the right food, the right soil. You tug the diseased leaves out, prune the grabby branches, yank out the choking, nutrient-hogging kind of weeds, keep the pretty but poisonous ones labeled and separate.

If you think of it as assembling a huge-ass multi-ship garden in the heart of the Empire, it feels a little less daunting, the thought of giving everyone a little chance to flower up.

You hike up Zaphir and set her on your shoulders. Not for nothing you named this ship _The Garden of Shangri-La_.

"My Dudes!" you sing out. "Brothers and Sisters! The Empress done called us up. There's being war. Not uppity slaves or smart-aleck pirates or huddled up heretics, but real motherfucking, ship-asploding, alien-stabby war. They be pissing her off, and it's being at our job to go and piss back— on their eyes!"

They cheer, do the mandatory racket. Zaphir calls out, bounces on your shoulders. Your cavalreapers clang their spears on their helmets, which can't be good, but hey, if it makes them happy.

"But I ain't be doling out the sparkly falsehoods to my good bros and sis," you continue, once the noise abates. "These motherfuckers are looking to be a canny tricksy sort, with all of them weird toys and 'sleight o' hand. And we are like to be the lucky ones, my dudes, to be putting the first troll ganders on their maiden show. That's being recipe for a joke of a sendoff. But right there is being the job of a vanguard: we be going first so the ones behind take a good look and a long note at how we done die."

You take a good long look at the soup of serious faces in front of you.

"We're gonna be a plot twist, my motherfuckers. We ain't gonna die. I be putting this down, right here, right now—" another massive cheer is building up, and you raise your voice to speak through it— "I swear to the motherfucking Messiahs, no matter what— no matter what some aliens be throwing at us— no matter _what—_ "

No matter what the Empire pulls, you and Pascal think together—

"I'mma wade through the muck!" You shout over the clamor. "I'mma crawl on the mud, I'mma dig into compost, whatever it be taking— but on my fucking word we be flying in and then we be flying out, _together_ , and we be showing all those motherfuckers _we's being trolls_!!"

The waterfall of cheers cascades around you, indistinguishable from the noise of actual water. You like that, it's a soothing sound.

You did a lot of thinking together on what to say here, how to let your people know enough to trust, how to still sound appropriate enough for whatever future digging might come about, and you're glad they liked it. You mean most of it, for what it's worth. At least the parts that regard them.

You haven't received word yet from the Spiceler, or any more secret files. Pascal and his equivalent have exchanged files and inscrutable secretarial stuff, but nothing that could incriminate either side; there's a feel of waiting, of things up in the air.

Ain't no sense in sending the priceless and irreplaceable off into destruction, and you can't assume you won't be dispatched into the heart of a trap by an angry Duke. This is a test neither of you signed up for, but which you need to pass.

You'll wade through the muck and crawl on mud and dig into compost. Whatever it takes to not die. For the sake of these secrets you have yet to learn.

You're looking forward to developing a reputation as a slippery coward.

You come down off the table for a round of back-patting, scattered salutes, transfer Zaphir off to Navitrix. It's time to rendezvous.

#

The bridge has been rearranged slightly, mostly in order to camouflage a couple of special hideouts for Zaphir. Other changes were focused on your communication screens— mostly devoting a wide chunk of real estate to an actual fenestrated wall, on Stormrip's suggestion. Epic conquest movies have involved wide outside viewports so often and for so long that a number of senior commanders actually expected them, and looked down on ships that went without; they were fucking useless, of course, but a simulacrum went a long way into shutting some dumb fuckers up.

Not like you can't turn it off and play a badass screensaver instead, at least when no Dukes are around to get in your case. Because Galiom knows you well, he went and put up a screen of fake-ass speeding stars before leaving for his downtime. It's gloriously kitsch.

Talcha expertly navigates your ship among the cluster of other waiting vessels around Fernroye 37— the most pathetic planet designation known to trollkind; the Duke only ever managed four planets at most, none of which simultaneously— and then you're made to sit there idling, up to and then twenty minutes past the designated hour.

You're concentrating so hard on looking alert and imposing that you jump right up out of your chair when the Imperial jingle plays. Which is handy as everyone's supposed to stand up for it anyway; hopefully you came across as, like, super stoked about standing up for authority or whatever.

The jingle finishes playing, and the Duke's face pops up in the middle of your kitsch starry field, the Imperial Standard at his back.

" _Salute!_ " he barks out, and you do that while you wonder what this is about. " _At ease!!_ " he barks again. You stop saluting. "Good."

Did he… did he do the thing that _other_ people usually do for him before he starts a speech? You can only guess, as he immediately moves on to actual normal speaking.

"Rejoice!" He begins, as Pascal quietly thinks of the word _normal_ and then thinks the word _redacted_ , "for you have been handpicked—" you kinda doubt that— "to further the Imperial Cause in ways your feeble little brains cannot begin to comprehend! From beyond our territory, from the blackened reaches of the empty, savage systems not yet blessed by Her Imperious Condescension's regard, arises a _rabble_ of wannabe _usurpers_ and _conquerors_ , intoxicated in their _delusion_ of martial superiority! And in their feeble-minded, twitter _patted_ thrashings, they have done the unthinkable, the unacceptable… they have _damaged_ Imperial Property!"

You school your expression into one of proper outrage, but truth is, you're wholly distracted. The Duke looks like… well, he looks like warm shit. He's definitely freshly awake, but doesn't look like he's been in sopor; his face is creased in a weird pattern, visible through some hastily applied make-up, his eyebags are puffed out, eyes veined in orange, and his hair ain't seen a comb for sure. You've been tracking the one funny little flyaway lock of it that's been floating above his head and undulating with every emphatic spitting of a word. His ear-fin looks crumply on the creased side.

Also, while he did his whole speech, the rest of your screen was being slowly populated with other highbloods and seadwellers, you presume your fellows from the neighboring ships. They were all looking very serious and attentive, and when he made that final announcement they also done and looked properly outraged in various degrees of unconvincing.

You're trying not to laugh at that when a final window pops neatly on the panel above his, displaying a very clean-cut tealblood— also sitting in front of an Imperial Standard.

Unlike the Duke's, his doesn't look green-screened in.

"Thank you, Duke Evergrow," he says, no-nonsense as a newspeller dismissing the weather-prophet. "I'm Uthmar Baluff, Her Imperious Condescension's Eighth Retainer, and I'll be taking care of the details from now on."

Oh. Oooooh shit.

No wonder the Duke didn't say a peep of complaint. For all practical purposes, this fucker outranks him! Holy shit, this is amazing. You're mentally chef-kissing at your entire crew.

"These alien interlopers, here-fore designated _Sloppers_ ," (who comes up with this shit?) "made themselves known by interfering with an ongoing evaluation and pre-terraforming process in one of the Empress's designated future Imperial Spa Retreats." (What, really?) "It was a project near and dear to her heart—" (wait, no, it's just a bullshit story to hide the actual mess, you're a dumbass) "—the untimely interruption of which has upset her greatly; more important and more relevant to us, however, is the fact that these _sloppers—_ " (wow, taste the contempt there, brother, it's pure syrup) "—struck at a time in which the Empress herself had come to oversee the status of her new retreat."

He stopped for a second of theatrical silence.

"We believe the timing to be… coincidental. Still," he picks up a pile of what looks like imperial-branded cue cards and taps them gently on his table, "it's an affront, an unprecedented _humiliation_ , for a hostile force of any number, caste or species to embarrass our defenses so— in front of Her Imperial Eyes, no less. All the military staff present at this _fiasco_ has been duly and deservedly culled for this unacceptable ignominy. But the _sloppers_ —" another dramatic pause— "are still at large. And they are very deliberately provoking us."

He taps his cue cards again, lays them down gently, steeples his fingers.

"We have located these… crude… devices in several strategic locations around their point of strike," he says, and one by one your fellow captains are replaced on the screen by some weird rotating stones with cool carvings— except for one, which remains still and in low-resolution. "We have determined that they describe a location and time at our galactic outskirts, by means of specific angles between specific cosmic bodies. It's a mostly empty location, which we have determined to be their choice of battlefield. Yes, Lady Ululla Possta?"

One of the stones is replaced by a young seadweller, looking very shy and incredibly dorky in thick-ass, eye-distorting glasses.

"Umm," she mumbles uncertainly, hand raised like a pupa in a schoolfeeding call, "may I ask what is wrong with that particular footage? Is there an ongoing connectivity issue we should be wary of?"

The dude— Uthmar— simply nods slowly to himself.

"It's not a connectivity issue, my Lady," he says, all professional enunciation. "That is the first such device we found. And, in his patriotic zeal and worry for Her Imperious Condescension's well-being, his Excellency the Duke destroyed it before its purpose was determined."

So the Duke fucked up. And seeing how the images were immediately withdrawn and replaced with the original rows of faces, the stones were displayed just so Uthmar would have an excuse to rip on him.

And that little one gave him what he wanted, real fast at that; meek she may seem but she's a smart one.

"But with or without one of the devices, we had enough information from the others to ascertain their intended message," Uthmar goes on. "Having made their choice of place and time, the _sloppers_ may believe themselves in possession of the upper hand. But a trap known is a trap undone, and maneuverability is our strongest point. We will take their invitation, surround them, and route them. And, most importantly of all, we will allow a number of them to flee. That is the Duke's chosen strategy."

Yeah, right. Pascal just watched the Duke hiccup and then surreptitiously release a silent burp. The Duke's chosen strategy was clearly to get fuckin' sauced and lose track of the rendezvous time, and god only know what he'd come up with were it not for this teal retainer.

Still, you nod, and your fellows nod as well. So this first skirmish is just to figure out where they're coming from; sounds legit. Also, considering how you were fed a cockamamie tale of suddenly victimized spa retreats instead of the dumb truth of a mismanaged colony, you might not be _quite_ that disposable yet.

On the other hand, Pascal is researching himself some average viewport recording specs, and is pretty doubtful of the sorry state of that one rock picture. So… fuck knows what they may be hiding.

You're given the details of the weirdly arranged time and place for the allegedly announced ambush, as well as assigned a number of extra vessels along with your own. You'll have a couple hundred more fliers to manage along with yours, as well as two more captains to befriend.

…all in the two hours time you have left to your next, possibly very messy, rendezvous. _Eesh_.

Well, nothing for it. You contact your garrison and the captain you literally did not even know existed, assign them a meeting point of your own to gather with your new lot. Why the _fuck_ make your ship come out all this way on its own if you'll be leaving for battle on the spot?

To more easily cull anyone who asks for it, is Pascal's morbid theory.

You make your detour to your new posse. They strike a pretty intimidating figure in your radars and the fenestrated wall, a veritable locust-cloud of fast strikers, more than half of them confirmed equipped with high-focus short-and-long wave blasters according to all the incoming status handshakes Talcha is having to process. (The reality is that they're all pretty mismatched when it comes to hull materials, shape and defensive specs, and some of them seem downright cobbled together from trash. Those are also the ones with the higher ratio of ridiculous firepower, so. Whoever's captaining _those_ knows their priorities. You don't expect to see them again, whatever comes of this battle.)

Your three direct underlings report visually on a conference call.

"Lord Wrathtor!" says a skinny-looking blueblood, with a big hooked nose and prominent teeth and sunken cheeks; he salutes with a whole lot of elbow. " _Muss_ tang at your service, and may I express how _thoroughly_ overjoyed I am by this opportunity to serve _directly under you!_ "

His eyes bug out a little as he finishes his line, and his voice goes all weird and breathless. His huge teeth are laid bare in a smile, along with twice as much acreage of bumpy gums. Did you… did you ever meet him before? Because you're starting to think you did, then swore never to do it again, then blocked him from memory.

Man, you miss Visegrip. She's like fuck-deep in pirate shit with no internet and she's so much cooler and less off-putting than basically every blueblood outside your crew.

Maybe you should loan this pile of elbows to the anti-piracy peeps.

"Lord Wrathtor!" squeals a little seadweller girl who, seriously, looks to have come out of her ordeals yesterday. She may well have; you can't imagine why else a seadweller would be suffered to be put under the authority of anything other than another seadweller. "I am Duchess Maremaid. Guide me well!"

She's short and almost as skinny as Musstang. You hope it's not a pattern, or you might feel the need to send food to these perfectly capable confirmed adults.

But you're relieved to find the third is someone with plenty of meat in their bones.

"Lord Wrathtor," she says. She looks a lot like a short Visegrip— cropped hair, wide shoulders, wide everything— though where Visegrip is rectangular and muscular and brick-like, this one is chubbier and softer, young still. But perhaps because she looks like Visegrip and you had her in your mind, you think you see more competence in this one than the others; she keeps her face smooth and straight as she salutes. "Darkdart, at your service."

"Very well," you nod to the three. "Do ya'll have the lowdown?"

Carefully blank looks all around. You wouldn't be surprised if each of them got gossip from the grapevine that they're not supposed to admit to having.

"Basically, some smartass new aliens from nowhere done 'pissed Her Imperious Condescension off," you say, "and then they laid a cute little ambush everyone can see coming." Because they told you about it. "The plan is we're gonna go trip that ambush, we're gonna humor them a little, see what they're about and why they think they're hot shit. This is being our first dance with these jokers, so our _first_ job is taking notes. _Then_ we crush the lot. And last but not least, my motherfuckers, we let a number of them limp away off back to their crib, and we follow all sneak-like. That's our big thing. Because then we can crush their crib, and that there's the least what Her Imperious Condescension is demanding. Got it?"

They nod, looking generally vindicated in whatever suspicions they originally had.

"So," you say, give them a moment to get back to standing properly at attention, "this ain't being about showy stunts or glorious kills or whatever. Not for ya'll, not for your flier squads, you get me?"

Blank looks.

"We ain't competing for numbers. Ain't no letterboard I care about being on. What matters here is making these new fuckers show their hand. Because for them to mess with us, they gotta have something they think _can_ mess with us. And we're all gonna look like dipshits if the main host gets messed with in front of Her Imperious Condescension. And we can't have that, can we?"

Much less blank looks.

"So my big number one order here is not being fucking heroes. There's being plenty of dumbasses out there to do that. We're gonna be smart and we're gonna be practical and we're gonna play it good and safe until they're done showing off, and _then_ we move in for the kill. Got it?"

Enlightened nodding. You think you detect some relief in the little seadweller.

"Good. Now, my main motherfuckers, we're off to war. All glory to the Empire."

" _Glory to the Empire!_ " they call out, a little mismatched but enthusiastically, before their windows turn off.

#

The rendezvous location is empty. As in, basically, a huge fuckoff big-ass patch of useless inbetween cosmic space, now occupied by a massive wall of Alternian ships idling like so many sitting quackbeasts.

You really, really, very strongly don't like any of this. Like, just strategically speaking, and speaking as someone who's not exactly a great strategist or anything, you're pretty sure most of this lot should be hiding a few flight-minutes away, maybe hunkered down in the middle of one of the closest gas clouds. For all that the Imperial Retainer said you had the advantage of maneuverability in wide-open space, you feel more like you're exposed as fuck.

And also, with so many fliers fucking about? Maneuvering is going to be such bullshit, at least on this side of the field. Which brings up the question of why you're all drifting on one side of the field and turned to _this_ particular wide expanse of nothingness.

(Pascal is pretty sure the answer was on that low-res, obscured rock. You ain't doubting.)

You hit the rendezvous time, and then hit five minutes later.

"Hah!" the Duke manifests in one of your comm windows, looking a little more put together than he had previously been. "The cowards tremble at our might! How long will it be, I wonder, until they gather enough of their wits to honor their appointment?"

You and Pascal decide pretty much simultaneously that the _actual_ rendezvous time hasn't come yet, and everyone was forced to scramble in two hours notice for no reason other than this diss the aliens will never even hear.

Well, this bitch wants to diss? You think, and then you immediately stop thinking that, because you can't be provoking at this dumbass _right_ at this juncture, goddammit. But you barely get time to mourn before another panel pops up, and then you're suddenly in a little conference call instead of a one-way broadcast.

The Duke looks downright stumped by this turn of events, as well as the presence of a handful of his chosen leaders, you included.

"Why, your Excellency, one would think these savages know not the etiquette for dates!" Says another seadweller, cheerfully. "You don't get to be fashionably late when _you're_ the one trying to impress!"

"Maybe a poor motherfucker got to be feeling shy, peeping at our accoutrements," you say, happy to add your own jab now that the opportunity presented itself. "Maybe he got an urge to be powdering his face, combing his hair a little extra, ironing out them creases."

"Maybe they got cold feet," the shy one with glasses muses aloud. "Maybe they slept in…"

"Took some liquid courage," a painted sister jumps in. "Then a whole lot more. We're in for disappointment, my invertebrothers— ain't no good performance done _sauced_."

You're pretty sure she done crossed a line, but the Duke is nodding gleefully at your describing his own previous entrance, all oblivious-like, and you sure ain't clarifying shit.

"In spirit, we are already victorious," he says, pompous as all fuck. "Whatever dares come to meet us, will come crushed in all but the most literal way. And that, my _friends_ , is where we come in."

He smiles vapidly at the four of you, before frowning in vague confusion.

"Have we…" he wags an uncertain finger. "Have we met before?"

You get to watch as everyone else's ganders flit about as they glance at the other figures in their respective screens. _Who's he talking to?_ Is written on their faces. _Or did he, like, literally forget we met two hours ago?_

"Sir?" says the one guy. Seems a proactive sort. "I was present in Rear Admiral Blutsmär's soirée commemorating the Imperial Jubilee, a sweep and a half ago, in which we were blessed by your unforeseen attendance. I would be honored to be remembered among so many other storied guests."

Holy shit, the Duke crashed parties even before he got in the Condesce's graces. And also…

"It is my greatest fucking regret to be admitting to this," you say, bowing, in a sudden mad burst of inspiration from Pascal, "but I ain't never walked as gilded a path as what might be crossing with Your Excellence, is my fear."

And then you straighten your back and holler at Pascal, like, _this motherfucker doesn't even remember us_. So you have a different face on, and the bridge behind you got mixed up a bit, and Sundra's the one in the comm chair instead of Galiom, but still. Somehow. _This motherfucker doesn't even fucking remember us_.

Pascal is just rolling back his memory of that one fated call and going. Exactly how sauced was he when he dumped Saldor on our ass? Because you can only assume the answer is "enough not to fucking remember you". What… what does this guy think happened to Saldor?

According to gossip from the Spiceler's secretancillary, which you both assume is sourced from a spy reporting straight from the Duke's ship and thus god's own truth, Saldor had promised the Duke some sort of rarefied gift which he then failed to provide. So… he got in your ship to get back in the guy's good graces, yeah? Did the Duke just assume Saldor was going to report once he had results and never before? Or did Saldor just up and vanish according to his memories?

No wonder the Spiceler told you not to worry too much. The Duke may be a petty dumbass, but the dumbass is somehow stronger than the petty.

The others are done with their respective turns of ass-kissing, and the Duke looks a little dubious still but mostly appeased.

"It is unfortunate that we have not been introduced as befits those of our respective stations," he says. "Once the battle is over, I invite you all to toast to the Eternal _Beauty_ and _Glory_ of Her Imperious Condescension, _together_ — and if your showing is good, perhaps I might even prevail upon her, as her moirail, to grace us with her own _Presence_!"

Everyone makes sure to automatically gasp with the proper amount of awe. "Glory to the Empire!" you blurt out, and it kinda sounds more like the shit you say when you drop a pot on your toe, but the others all take you up on the game and glorify the empire loud and good, to the Duke's satisfaction.

"Now look smart," he says. "The enemy may recover its wits at any moment." And then he settles back on his chair and turns a little to the side, you assume towards a fenestrated wall.

You nudge Navitrix away from her game, make sure Gunneric and Engisnër are out of their bored daydreams. The _real_ appointed time is probably near.

It's a couple more minutes before Navitrix's equipment picks up on _something._ You're kind of mentally over her shoulder, sharing in her confusion even as the specifics go over your head— it's only one, she thinks, and the shape is _wrong_ , it wobbles weirdly, also it popped up at the very edge of our range fully formed even though it should have more like faded into spectrum…

" _There it is!_ " the Duke barks, startling you; the thing has been in the radars for several seconds already. (He's probably way back out of direct range of the thing, reasons Pascal, and you just go, this motherfucker, for real.) "It's the vanguard— _crush it!_ All long-distance psychic blasts on full power, at once! _Glory to the Condesce!_ "

"Glory to the Condesce," you repeat a little more calmly, then signals to Gunneric. He already started warming up the cannon as soon as the newcomer popped on the radars, so there's not much prep to be doing, thankfully; Pascal informs the other ships and sends out instructions to the fliers, and you wait around with your arm raised for the Duke to count, and you stare at the Duke, and the Duke stares offscreen intensely, and then he suddenly shakes himself off and goes—

"Three!" and then arrhythmically: "Two, one! Shoot! _Glory to the—_ "

You whip your arm down and Gunneric shoots, and Sundra activates the outside view on your fenestrated wall so you get to see a thousand lines of light shoot out and curve into a single point in the infinite cosmic horizon, and you think to yourself, this is legit pretty cool.

The energy blasts shoot for two seconds (for those of you who warmed up properly at least), then fade into dark crisscrossing lines mucking up your ganders. There's a weird general silence where you hear the ship hum under your feet. You stare out, blink a few times.

Gunneric announces the registered impact. The Duke looks to be about to crow something, but you already know better from Navitrix. Whatever is approaching did not even so much as change orbit.

With a few seconds delay, you surmise from the Duke's expression that this information has reached him.

On the fenestrated wall, the approaching enemy finally enters visible space, as a glimmering dot in the distance not unlike a star. Navitrix zooms in, and in, and in, revealing in all its alien glory a complete lack of damage.

Whatever it _is_ , it approaches, white, golden, pristine, bright and demonic; it's like an atom map, also like a trick knot, shifting in an around itself in a strange dance. There's something like a core at the very center, pale gold and gleaming, not so much hidden or shielded as it's decorated by the elongated, elegantly moving periphery, wing-like, blade-like. It's beautiful and strange and more off-putting than Musstang's smile.

" _More power!_ " the Duke barks, and you signal Gunneric. You _really_ don't think it'll do any good, but. You're here blind for the sole purpose of _seeing_ , after all.

He counts down again, proper, and you shoot— for four, five, six continuous seconds. Every passing second the Duke looks more sober. By the time the output bleeds out and Talcha goes into cooldown, the approaching ship looks fresh off a polish.

The continuous barrage from over a thousand ships did not so much as dent a single rotating wing. And by the Messiahs, they are giving you the willies. The way they rotate around that eye-like core makes your eyes want to go out of focus.

" _Twenty-seconds build-up!_ " the Duke starts screaming, but— his voice is crackly, squeaky and fading—

His screen fizzles, distorts, dances, and you find that you're now staring into a palatial view.

An alien sits in the middle of an elaborate stone-carved display, so organic and ancient-looking it seems to have spontaneously arisen from the gutted rock. Its tall seat is draped in pristine white and pale gold silk, hanging from the display at its back and spread over the dais under its feet, pooling onto stone steps and verdant grass.

The carvings are wings, fringed in crude, curling feathers. More silk is draped in the shape of massive wings, converging towards the alien's back. Clearly this alien commander has a theme.

The alien shifts. (You'd actually forgotten about it— dressed in yellow and white and with its brown skin, it was pretty nicely camouflaged by the demonic opulence of its surroundings.)

"Umm," says the alien. It lowers its shoulders, lifts its chin, straightens its back; the fingers resting on the limb-supporting struts of its throne wiggle.

It launches into rapid-fire alienese, stately and clipped, which it maintains for a couple of minutes before apparently running out of steam and growing progressively more mumbly and hesitant. At some point it started wringing its hands, and eventually it just pulls out some sort of communicator to confer nervously with the miniaturized hologram of a tall figure in black.

This alien looks kind of incompetent, you wonder Pascal-ways. Hot-shot alien seadweller? Their Duke equivalent? Could be.

The display suddenly closes up in on the alien. It's surprisingly troll-like from close-by; no horns, but the build of its features and even the color of its hair are very much familiar, even pleasing. But in keeping with the disturbing color trend, the gold of its eyes are white, and the pupils behind its incongruently normal spectacles are bright unholy lime.

It begins to mime.

Somewhere in the ashy dregs of your mirthful piety you feel a spark of offense light up. Miming is a most holy and lofty form of worship among the subjugglators, taken up only by those who undertake the oath of silence— but aliens had no way of knowing that, of course, and in the lack of a mutual tongue gestures are the most obvious alternative; you bury what's left of your religiosity back where it belongs and focus on the slow, deliberate movements of the alien's golden-brown hands.

It crosses its hands over its chest, then raises its palms parallel to each other, and finally points to its pink mouth.

…it wants to talk face-to-face, you decide, after watching a couple of permutations. It's kind of obvious, actually.

A secondary display blinks into the Duke's fishy face; looks like he found a replacement for the hijacked line. " _Prepare for the next salvo!_ Short-wavelength cannons only—" He squeaks, and fuck if he doesn't look freaked right the fuck out. " _Twenty seconds buildup!_ "

"I think it wants to negotiate," you let him know, although you don't expect him to care.

"Let's see how it negotiates against some _heavy ordnance!_ " the Duke sneers, or tries to, before his face is replaced by a countdown. (You wonder if he's drinking on the captain seat.)

You weren't disappointed, but still you shake your head to yourself before signaling Gunneric again. The angel ship already shrugged the first salvos off, so you don't really see how the next one will be any different, but if it makes the Duke feel better, well. You're under his command, regardless of how you feel about it.

You raise your hand. The countdown reaches zero. You whip your hand down. The cannon shoots. The fenestrated wall is covered in coruscating lines converging against the glimmering wingship.

Gunneric announces an impact. On the big display, the alien looks mildly heartbroken, like someone slapped a muffin off its hands. There's no sign of even the slightest instability in the view.

It lowers its eyes, gives a disappointed sigh; his hand moves somewhere offscreen, gestures unseen, and shiny floating rectangles surround his head in translucent alien script. He looks like a lusus about to forcibly dunk a wiggler in its ablution trap; it's the same air of doing something unpleasant for your own good. Even the few alien words he utters sound exasperated.

On the fenestrated wall, the distant glowing ship wavers slightly, and a brain-twisting ripple spreads outward through the black cosmic tableau.

Nothing happens, not for a few long seconds. The bridge falls into tense silence. You watch the alien's huffy righteousness through your ganderbulbs, and through Pascal's you observe your people glance at each other in silent confusion; it's thanks to this silence that you hear the distant snapping groan of carapace stress, even while your eyes register dismay falling on the enemy's face.

Did he fuck up? He fucked up. You just know it, this alien Duke somehow done fucked up.

Admittedly you have no idea what to do with that awareness, and it's Pascal, bless his soul, who grasps the situation out of thin air.

"Hull integrity status!" he calls out to Engisnër through your mouth, even as you run around and past your chair, eyes darting wildly, searching before you even quite know what _for_ —

Zaphir jumps out of her brand-new cranny, eyes wide and panicked, and you pull her against yourself, a gesture as instinctual as it's meaningless. She huddles against your leg. You cup the back of her head.

You feel a very slight breeze.

The bridge… is not the place for a breeze. The garden has breezes. Not… not the bridge.

At your back, Engisnër is silent. She's sagging on her seat in shock, her face gone sallow. Zaphir's doodles flap around her display, softly at first, but building momentum. There's a lot of red on her screen, a lot of— of blinking, spreading like the miasma in a block-terrain game. You think you see bits of 3D wireframe detach and disappear.

It looks bad.

You turn around— your and Pascal's minds are already working in tandem, already trying to determine the most stable area with air-tight pressuring, maybe the lab, but if not then the lab is the _worst_ , and by god you need to get Olvier and Melita somewhere safe but the bridge is _very much not safe—_ and you sense more than hear as the fenestrated wall cracks at your back.

The breeze turns into a gale. The double-layered carapace dome that should have been _your very final defense against vacuum leaks_ is groaning and crackling, horrid and too much close, a mix of sounds loud as a thunderstorm, incongruously delicate as childhood marimbas. Sheets and sheets of colorful crayon portraits tornado around you.

So this is how an alien messes with the Empire. And a fleet of a thousand ships sure just learned it first-hand.

At some point during the chaos you must have crouched down and wrapped yourself around Zaphir's little body, for whatever good that would do. You almost laugh, but her shaking drains the humor out of you; you find yourself sharing with Pascal the wish that, out of everyone in your vessel, you could have spared her from this. Just… just her. At least her.

He responds with rueful acknowledgment, discreet agreement, and that feeling of reaching his mind out like a hand for you to grasp— and as you touch it, time seems to slow down and thicken around you, syrupy and rubbery, such that this moment of communion is the last you hold in your consciousness before everything stretches into eternity and a silent stillness.

(In the future, this disastrous first contact will become known as _The Great Crash_.)

(But only among your alien pals.)

(In the Empire, it totally most definitely will have never happened.)


	17. Chapter 17

This ain't your coon.

The thought just kind of alights on you outta nowhere. You're lying down. Bunch of cloths. No sopor. Above you is like. Not your ceiling.

You sit up, just to try it. It happens easy. You got some unfamiliar pajama ensemble on, barefoot. You're on top of a padded platform, not all that tall really, with some snuggleplanes on.

Shit's weird. Everything is… weird. You feel like you got a brick straight to the ideas. Nothing hurts, but everything is slippery.

You set a foot down, probe the floor. It's firm. Carpeted. Not scratchy. You put your other foot down. Put your weight on them. Standing up happens with no drama. Something is _definitely_ wrong and you cannot fucking figure out what.

You reach for Pascal and you come up empty and you fall back on your ass.

Fuck.

_That's_ what's wrong.

It comes back to you— the fleet, the creepy angel ship, the Duke alien, the wind. The crackling like chimes. Zaphir in your arms, god, sweet motherfucking messiahs— you put your head in your hands and even that is weird because your face is bare.

Something goes knock-knock-knock.

You look around yourself in an empty-headed torpor, and when a lady-shaped thing opens a door and peeks in it's just, it's just. The wildest thing?

She's pink-eyed and white-haired and bright-skinned and in some sort of medicullery coat, tip to toe pale and thin like bleached tissue, and she looks so _trollish_. So convincingly a person.

"Hello! Mr. Eudora Kalhil, am I correct?" she says, in— and your addled thoughts just trip all over— a nice and passable mid-blood accent.

You stare at her and don't even know what face you're making.

She smiles sheepishly, shakes her shoulders in a weak shrug. "I won't ask if you're okay," she says, "the circumstances being what they are. But physically speaking— do you feel any pain? Are you hale?"

You keep staring.

"Do you need anything?"

"Pascal," you blurt out. You need him to think.

"Oh," she says.

"Where is he."

"Um," she starts—

"Where is everyone?" you ask again, more certain of yourself, more awake.

"Well—"

"I'm alive!" you tell her, finally. "Are they— are _they_ , too?"

She stops fidgeting, composes herself. Straightens her back.

"Yes," she says, with no hesitation. Maybe with a bit of pride.

You stand up, wordlessly. She sighs, shakes her head to herself, but pushes your door all the way open and steps back to let you out.

She makes a beeline for some sort of locker. "Put these on, will you?" She's got her back to you, wiggling a pair of slippers at your general direction. You take them gormlessly, and the coat that follows, all the while staring at her paper white back with the insistent feeling that you should be doing something.

You put on the coat and the slippers and then finally think that you could have punched the back of her head.

Then what, though? You follow her through some pale-grey passages, closed doors. You don't know where you are, you don't know how many other enemies are around, you don't know where your crew _is._ And this place is probably monitored to hell and back. It would be a waste of energy and effort and whatever is passing for good-will between the two of you right now.

Another alien glances at her, then does a double-take. It's got a mug in one hand. The mug doesn't even waver. That's how little they fear you; dude's half your size but don't even spill.

You're worthless on your own. But hey, at least this means they picked out the uselessest guy in the entire ship to do whatever with. Question? You're assuming you were singled out to question.

You're in front of a wider door. The woman stops, takes a deep breath.

"Do you remember what happened, Mr. Kalhil?"

"All too clear," you mumble.

"Our envoy?" she asks. "The transmission?"

"The Duke," you say, and then shake your head. "I mean, yeah. He wanted to mime. Then he destroyed our ship. And others, probably?"

"Prince, actually," she says, and turns to face you. "Our system of governance is very, very different from yours, and probably way too complex to get into right now. But he was a Prince of Skaia, a very specific non-political position he shares with many others. And in Skaia, royalty is not hatched— it's chosen."

"What's this got to do with—"

"I'm! I'm getting there!" She flaps her hands, then forcibly lowers them. "I'm getting there," she repeats, with more poise. "See, they're chosen by— an entity, you could say, who has unlimited access to both the past, the future, and all the, uh," she wiggles the fingers in one hand, searchingly, "the could-have-beens and the might-not-bes. By which I mean we don't all know what the criteria is? We can only guess in hindsight. And Prince Jake, the one who met you, was… a recent appointment."

"So he fucked up," you say, hoping to coax her into getting to the point.

She cringes. "I _wish_ ," she says, and her face is crumpled with shame. "We did, not him. He saved you all."

She finally pushes the big door open, and— not your crew yet, no, but holy fuck is there a ton of movement in the area. Aliens bald and hairy, black and white and pink and brown and mottled, all busy as bees and looking very scienterrorifical in smocks and masks and carrying tablets, power-walking to and fro. Some look at you, but you don't even get double-takes; they probably knew you were coming.

"Skaian princes are given some pretty gnarly powers," she continues, as you walk briskly through all sorts of weird, shiny equipment. Some giant pill or somesuch glides by in a hurry, guided by a sweaty science alien. "Some are weak at first, and they get to grow into their powers. Others just win the magic lottery. Prince Jake was titled Page of Hope and sprouted a first-generation Fruit, which was ridiculous— you know who he was before being a prince?" She turns to you, then answers without missing a beat: "A very hot _idiot_. His biggest claim to fame was surviving alone inside a small nature reserve. He was in there for _months_. He wrestled tigers. They found him asleep in a zoo enclosure with the albino bisons. The zoo wasn't even close to the reserve. He was like… seven sweeps at the time? Every time I remember this dumb story I just want to slap him again—"

You tune her out and find yourself distracted by the alien lab's central fixture— a huge, glittering, wall-spanning structure, round and chromed, flat and full of beautiful colors slowly swirling into an inky deep.

"—and the reserve was like a two-day walk across, even. Mr. Kalhil?" She taps your arm gently. "I'm sorry, I'm digressing. We're all a bit on edge here. Whoops!" Another huge chrome pill slides by. "Maybe we should get out of the way, huh?"

She powerwalks you to the opposing wall, trailing at the big pill's wake, but you don't follow it through the next flappy doors; instead she tugs you a bit to the side.

"Okay, so what really happened out there, and what you're looking at," she says, "is, as I mentioned before, our bad. An anthropological team was doing long-term observation on a burgeoning civilization when your empress flew in out of nowhere like a huge showboat. Her actions were _very_ worrying. We watched her from afar for a while, then deployed an AI to pose as a local. It investigated the materials used to build her ship and her facilities, and we… extrapolated from them."

She sighs, her shoulders droops.

"I was among the programmers who calibrated the spacefold disperser, and… I'm _sorry_." She sounds deeply, miserably tired. "It was supposed to physically disable external weaponry," she continues. "Or antennas, just, basically, cannon muzzles and… stuff. Shit jutting out of your ship at a certain distance. We couldn't even fathom how disparate the building materials would be, between her and… everyone else, apparently. When everyone started falling apart, I—"

She shakes her head.

"Prince Jake is a dim little bulb, but he's a kind soul. That, and very newly come into a preposterous amount of power. He had no idea what it entailed, or what he was capable of, but he believed he could stop the tragedy. And fortunately for all of us, his power turned out to be pure belief."

She raises a hand to span the inky, chromed fixture on the wall.

"He _stopped time_ on a limited portion of space. One thousand and twenty-five Alternian ships were suspended in there, seconds from catastrophic breakdown, for the last sweep and a half. Two thirds still remain— _wait!_ "

She grabs your arm and gets dragged, all while mewling _waitwaitwait_ , but you're forced to stop when a scienterrorist looks up from his screen and glares daggers at you.

That is, you're not really forced, but that's the look of someone who knows his shit and knows you don't know shit, and you're a good enough ship captain to know when you're out of your depth.

"Dude, don't!" She says, taking a couple shaky breaths. "First, that's literal space, with vacuum and shit. Second, time doesn't run in there, so you'll just freeze on the spot and we'll have to fish you out all over again! And third, your ship isn't there. It was, like, one of the first we pulled out, so."

You turn to her, expectantly.

"Um, just come," she says, and tugs you to the flappy door.

Past that, you're in another huge cavernous block, filled with rows upon rows of the giant metal pills. Just… rows upon rows upon rows upon rows, and also columns, just huge pills floating on top of each other and side by side—

You stop and stare and go "oh" under your breath and a bunch of the science aliens push you hastily onto a chair.

"Mr. Kalhil," the lady alien flaps a tablet at you. "It's okay, hello? Hello? Uh, every single one of these trolls is alive, and we are doing our best to extract them _and_ repair any harm incurred. Okay? Are you with me?"

"Is… is my crew here?"

"Yes," she says, "and so were you until not too long ago."

You clamber out of your chair and go tramping off into the forest of metal pills in a drunken lope.

"Over here, over here!" the alien calls out to your back, and you do an about face, follow the sound of her voice. Your hip hits one of the pills and it sways, turns ponderously like a boat in water, hits a neighbor with a muffled thud; you stop and stand in place and feel like a hundred ghosts are scrabbling up your veins from the soles of your slippers.

"Now, now," says a voice, and "Don't sweat, they're in suspended—" says another, and a bunch of hands gently guide you away into a proper path; you hear a small but distinctly bitchy mutter from somewhere further back and laugh a mad little giggle.

Your lady guide is standing on a far corner of the room, swaying and bouncing on the balls of her feet in a somewhat respectable fidgeting routine, and she waves awkwardly when you approach.

"Well, here we are!" she says, with strained cheer. "Capsules B-twelve to, uh," she turns to her tablet and you turn to the pills, pull pathetically at the closest one.

It's just a big metal pill with no latches you can find. You paw at it and then palm at it and you have no idea what you're doing.

"Where's Pascal?" you ask through numb lips. "Where's Zaphir?"

One of the other science aliens approaches, tablet raised. "Let me. That's…" he waves the tablet over the big pill, then looks at it again. "That's Sharsa Priore. We think. Your personnel files were way better organized than some we're dealing with, but we're still decoding a lot from the ground up, which is why—"

Sharsa, Sharsa. You don't know who that is. Pascal would, but you don't. You lower your head and start crying on the pill.

"You know," says your lady guide, from somewhere above, "is there any particular reason why our capsules don't have viewports? Unless the face was deformed in the event, there's really no reason why…"

"Um, this might be a problem in the future, yes—"

"Maybe we should use their label methods on the canisters, so future patients can track down their loved ones."

"Ugh, those are so _dehumanizing_ , but I suppose—"

Other voices join in, and the conversation shifts into alienese; you straighten up— crying over Sharsa's pill won't jog your memory— and find that the lady guide and a couple scienterrorists have abstained from the main discussion, and are sticking to your side.

"I found Pascal Stegan," says one of them, gently, leading you to a different pill— third from the floor, at about shoulder height to you. Not an appropriate placement to dramatically cling to.

You're a little embarrassed about your previous bouts of swooning.

"We can expedite his procedure," he says, while you brush a finger over Pascal's prison. "It'll take a few days, I'm afraid; my colleagues are focusing on a more urgent case. We're still studying your physiology, and most of us haven't been cleared for specialized procedures in troll patients yet." And then his voice fills with surprising eagerness: "But we found your ship to be truly _remarkable_ for the general wellness of its crew— just, far and away, head and shoulders above all the others we've extracted so far! So we hoped—" he hesitates— "if you can identify for us your medical specialists, we'd appreciate the extra guidance."

You sigh, thump your forehead heavily on Pascal's pill. "I need him first," you say.

"No, sure, of course—"

"I mean," you add, "that I need him literally. I'm a dumbass. I don't know my ass from my fronds without Pascal."

"Uuuh," someone says, then shuts up real quick, and you blurt out a laugh.

"I have a hard time with… with names and stuff," you admit, and your throat goes all thick on you. "I don't know which name belongs to which face, and which face belongs to which troll. I know people from their minds, straight on, and out that I know them from their words and the way they stand and the way they move, and even then, sometimes… sometimes my pan just fails on me. Pascal is my brain. Pascal's mouth don't obey him, but he can speak outta mine when it's needed, and that's how I was a good captain— he did all the hard thinking, and I did all the standing around being scary."

Your fingers tighten on the metal, harmlessly.

"I ain't a full person without him," you admit.

"Aw, gosh," says your lady guide, and then she starts rubbing awkward circles on your biceps. "Don't say that. I don't know your life but you're being a super fine guy on your own right now and I bet he'd agree. Okay? But you guys bring out his boyfriend next, then," she adds to the science aliens. "And I mean, maybe we're lucky and the guy in surgery right now is one of his doctors. Or wait, no, I'm a dumbass, why would a doctor have a hole in his gut, haha—"

"Wait," you blurt out, raise your head. "Wait, wait— back up. Who is it? Right now—"

"Um," one of the scienterrorists checks his tablet, "Olvier… Antias? Yeah. Pretty infected, and I figure you guys lacked appropriate tools and resources what with the dystopian bullshit government stuff, those all seem non-existent in every ship so far…" Then his voice grows excited. "But your sutures were sound, and the serum matched our physiological research, _and_ he was laid right under a spectrum light at the exact required intensity for optimal vitamin production! That's _genius_ , Mr. Kalhil, literally everyone else we've examined so far is suffering from chronic deficiency and it's complicating treatment like you wouldn't believe—"

"All the imperial sanctioned medical manuals we found were such _garbage_ , they didn't even mention your reproductive—"

"Your crew is literally the only one in this bunch that—"

"Setting it up in a garden was pretty great too, the psychological—"

"Are any of the plants medicinal, by the way?"

"We _need_ a knowledgeable source that practices outside your sanctioned material!"

"Huh," you mumble.

Huh.

#

So basically they even went and rescued your garden.

"Are you _kidding_ ," says your lady guide. "This shit is _historical!_ Hell, the shittiest hunk of junk in that heap of a fleet will be historical. But that garden is priceless— even if all the plants in it turn out to be useless decorative stuff, they're still the first botanical specimens we've met from _your_ side of the cosmos."

She's leading you down a different path, now. You were forced to admit that laying the sick under your rhododendron was a solution everyone kinda fell ass-backwards into, and not really a medical breakthrough or anything; on the other hand your medicullery team _did_ exchange notes with the Spiceler's— and _his_ team did, without a shadow of a doubt, make plenty of non-imperial-sanctioned medical breakthroughs.

The science aliens seemed a bit too intensely interested in the Spiceler for your peace of mind, so you made some noises about your garden, and your new friend solicitously extracted you from the pill room.

There's nothing you can do about your crew. You don't like it, but seriously, the place was wigging you out.

"We're really not exaggerating when we talk about how incredible your crew is, Mr. Kalhil," she says, grinning up at you a bit. "When we first managed to install the spacetime trails to investigate the frozen ships, sweet bleeding fuck, it was depressing. We've dealt with our share of mad dictators, and violation of basic rights, but _eesh_. Your case is special, alright. We don't know how your empress manipulates telomere decay on such a large scale to enforce that lifespan disparity— yet— but it's a clever and fucking _cruel_ strategy. Our best people are looking into it though—" she touches your arm with a sympathetic hand— "so your boyfriend will totally be fine in the long run."

You have no idea what she just tried to tell you, about telemetry or whatever. You've left all the science bustle behind, and she's leading you down a normal-looking corridor into a sort of entrance block, and then out.

Like, literally, out. Open sky over your head, clouds, mountains in the distance, the whole shebang. Outside like you haven't been in fucking _sweeps_. There's stars and a glow in the sky and you don't know if it's a sun or a moon.

She just laughs— it's _probably_ showing in your face— and steers you towards a greenhive. Oh, and what a greenhive it is, by the messiahs! A huge, crystalline fractal dome reflecting the sky in a dozen beautiful broken fragments. You're so punch-drunk with emotion you don't even think to look around for spaceports.

She stops you right in front of the entrance. "Oh," she says, laughing sheepishly, "and I didn't really know how to bring it up, since you were being so serious and intense and all. But you weren't actually the _first_ in your ship we rescued out. Hehe!"

And then she opens the door and tugs you in before you even really get what she just done said to you. But it's soon out of your mind, because… it's your garden.

The ceiling is all different, what with it not being a bunch of carapace plates with exposed wiring and all, but they actually— they actually went and put it all back together in _almost_ the exact way you had it all set up. The area is wider, so the planters are mostly set farther apart, but there's the big cherry tree on the far wall, and your bitumias right there, and your straw chairs and table, and the light rigs seem to be almost wholly preserved, too…

And smack dab in the center is Fakiya with her big and softly swaying leaves, her maw set in a smug little angle surrounded by incongruously feminine pseudo-petals. Your sight wavers with unshed tears; you can almost hear the shuffle of her canopy, the hum of the air purifiers, Zaphir's impish giggling…

Yeah. You can hear that a bit too convincingly.

You break into a run.

The first thing you see on the wide-open space around Fakiya is a scattered bouquet of crooked crayon drawings. The second thing you see is gobs of multicolored putty. The third is three pairs of shoes, and the fourth is three kids sitting on the beautiful tiled floor.

"Whoo— _pshhh!_ " Says Zaphir, as she leads her doll on a slow-motion flight through the air, capped with three backflips, before hitting another doll with its putty-horned head.

"Uaaaaaarrrrrrgh!" The bespectacled girl keeping her company tugs her own doll away with dramatic slowness, smacking it on the floor and then back up to its tumbling flight, amid emphatically pained grunts.

The third child, a long-nosed boy, looks curiously up at you.

"Uh," you sob helplessly, a single tiny sound, but Zaphir immediately halts her grisly doll subjugation to whip her head up and—

And then she screeches and bounces up to you, and you pick her up before she cracks her horn somewhere, and for a while you just.

You stand there. Just. Holding up her tiny body in disbelief that it's real.

You don't know how long it took you to actually register your surroundings again— around the time Zaphir started palming your face with her tiny hand while sobbing softly, you think— but eventually, while you rock her back and forth, a tenser and more vigilant part of you finally snaps awake and begins to study your company.

The two kids are alien, brown-skinned and hornless. The boy— you assume it's a boy— is black-haired with a close-cropped cut, and his small eyes are set deep around a prominent nose. He wears a dumb hat and watches you with soft, patient cluelessness. The girl, though…

Her eyes are lime, and she smiles at you with a deep, unchildlike satisfaction. She wears colors clearly not her own— crimson dress, bright blue sleeves— and her long hair is dark, striped with gray, stark white at her temples.

She smirks, as if noticing your stare, and nods slightly.

You are thoroughly wigged out.

"Lady Jade," says your lady guide, and the girl nods to her, more solemnly.

"Bye, Zaphir!" she calls out, waving all cheerful and childlike, and Zaphir waves weakly back before reburying her head on your shoulder; the girl picks her shoes and walks away, circling her way past the rhododendron, all hums and bouncing ruffles—

And from the other side of the rhododendron walks out a tall, severe willow of a woman— her dark hair striped gray and white at the temples.

She wears deep black, where the child wore colorful frills; an emblem gleams bright silver at her chest, and her shoes sparkle scarlet like a multifaceted jewel. She carries herself with the confidence and poise of one who could kill with a thought and a touch, and you know right there that, even among however many idiot time-stopping princelings they may have, she is _royalty_.

"Hello there," she says, without preambles. "Do you even have any idea how important you are?"

You hug Zaphir a little tighter and _almost_ step away from her approach.

"Of course you don't," she grits her teeth. "Poor fucking bastards. Boy, your empress is a mad bitch, and I'll punch her. In my secret imaginings, I puke in her face and piss in her mouth. But for your people, I suppose that's romance— not for mine, I assure you. Because after that, in my heart of hearts, I take you all in my hands, and away from her reach, and do not once look back to see whatever impression of a mutt's anus her shark mouth will morph into. Ah, well," she sighs, and the terrifying stone mask that was her face gentles. "But that is just the ineffectual power fantasy of an easily angered woman. Her pride is not for me to crush."

She digs her hand in the crook of your elbow, on the arm you have wrapped around Zaphir's shoulders, and guides you down past one of your amethyst fountains. "You may not believe it at the moment," she says, "but we are not holding you here as prisoners. No, we keep you here as our brothers, cousins, long lost and finally returned. Skaia foretold your arrival, and it foretells your redemption. We cannot and will not suffer your return to the revolting, abusive home you so fortuitously escaped; but we will help you build a new one, and we will watch you grow until you have the strength to dismantle that old building yourselves."

"Okay," you say, mostly because you're terrified.

"Are you frightened?" She asks.

"No," you lie.

She laughs. It's a surprisingly unthreatening sound.

"I'm just really angry," she says, and she's less remote somehow, less immense. More normal. "Here, it's the job of the strong to defend the weak, and of the old to nurture the young. Your society and the order it upholds feel to us like a deliberate corruption of some earlier, more wholesome society— and the picture of life in your vessel, even incomplete, gave us hope that this ideal could still be reapproached. We found two children in the frozen fleet so far, Eudora, did you know?"

She gives you a moment to stop and ride the horror, clutch Zaphir a little closer. (She's breathing slowly now. Asleep. Snoring softly under your ear.)

"The other will not soon recover, I fear. Not," her face goes grim, "while we're still building _troll medicine_ from the ground up. But Zaphir was a gift." She smiles fondly. "Her drawings, her little room! After trekking through rotting brigs and hellish whorehouses, your bridge was like a different world. And you were protecting her! We had to know for sure. It was a risk—" she glances at Zaphir from the corner of her eyes— "but we woke her _first_. She was brave and fierce!" The smile returns. "But when she calmed, she had a lot to say about her family."

She stops, flicks a hand. "For example," she says, as a familiar folder appears in her fingers. "Did you know her friend Olvier told her _all_ about this cool guy?"

You stare at the folder, its rope seal still dangling, frayed. She shakes it a little, in time with her small nods.

"It's in very poor form for me to read your correspondence, I admit," she says. "But in our position as scientists holding thousands of lives in our hands, privacy concerns were just not a priority. Though technically speaking, you _are_ under surveillance, what with attacking us… but I digress." She shakes the folder again. "This man. Cardam Tarrak. We need him."

You plant your feet, and the woman stops on her tracks, barely tugging your arm.

"If you're asking me to sell out Ol' Spice…" you trail off, because as threats go it's really got no future.

"By god, man!" she slaps your arm with the folder, casual as all that. "We want to protect him, he's _living history!_ And all this material he intended to pass onto you, that's your legacy— not you singular, you _plural!_ It belongs in a museum, in encyclopedias, in documentaries! An army of archivists is the _least_ it demands!"

"But!" you stutter, because, uh, it's all both really scary and also kind of flattering, and she looks more excited for all those secrets than you were, but… "The time— it— uh—"

"The ‘Foretold Times'?" she asks, opening the folder one-handed; the Spiceler's letter flaps precariously inside, right where Pascal last tucked it in. Her eyes skim over the fat cursive, then she shuts the folder with a decisive slap before it pops into nothing. "If I remember well, it's a prophecy from your Messianic Event, right?"

"What?" For a second you wonder what ChurchCon has to do with it, but, uh, if it's about the folder, then maybe it's about the Signless guy—

"But the prophecy is about a descendant, not about a repository for censored knowledge," she continues, like you didn't blurt out a dumb question. "Withholding this information was a safety decision made at some point _after_ him, right?"

You shrug helplessly, one-shouldered.

"Then, releasing it here, say, where the Condesce can't reach and where it won't be censored, it should be just fine, right?" She asks brightly, looking almost like the child she was apparently posing as not too long ago. "We have thousands of trolls, more than enough to populate a sizable city and build its own community. Shouldn't they get to know about their past, if they won't be punished for it?"

"I… I don't be knowing all that shit, lady," you say, pathetically, really wishing for Pascal.

"Think about it this way," she goes on, tugging you into resuming your walk. "The Signless's descendant will exist, and concurrent to his existence, the Alternian Empire will end. But what will cause its end? The descendant's mere existence? Or a rebellion led by him? Will it be coincidental or a result of his actions? If the former, then what does it matter if this gossip is out and about? If the latter, then— won't knowing about these matters _help_ fulfill the prophecy?"

"I dunno!" you insist.

"The thing with prophecies," she continues, unrelenting, "is that they can be _triggered_. A smart prophet knows how to word their prophecies so others can either avoid or initiate its contents, according to _their_ preference. The Signless Sufferer says the arrival of his descendant will herald the End Times for the Empire, but that's according to the abridged text we have _here_. Does Mister Cardam Tarrak have the _original_ text with the _original_ wording? And would he also incidentally like to talk to us about his youth, and his childhood, and how life was lived before this Adult Exile thing happened, and to compare notes with _your_ childhood, for example? He _lived_ through one of these rebellions. His memories are a _treasure._ So!" She smiles up at you. "We want to squee at him. That's all."

"Well, I," you try to put your verbs in order, "I can't be making at that decision all on my lonesome, my sis. Lady." You pet Zaphir's back a little, dithering. "Just— ask me again when I got Pascal. Or Olvier at least, he's the one what's been living this truth. It's all too much…" you shake your head. "I'm no good. Also I don't know about Ol' Spice now, where he's being at or anything, so." You shrug one-shouldered again. You don't even know if he's alive still, and that there sure is a depressing fucking thought.

The Lady looks momentarily disappointed. "Well, we can find him ourselves, I'm sure," she says eventually, soothingly, "I was really just hoping for an endorsement. We have time to workshop this, anyway, I mean," she laughs, "thousands of trolls to process and heal and even more incoming. But that does remind me, and I do think you can contribute to this discussion just fine on your own, Mister Humblebrain."

You stop at an open patch of floor, twilit in cool colors and broken up by the glass roof into all sorts of pretty little light shards.

"Where should we start?" she asks, casual as anything.

"With what?" you shoot back, more confused than anything.

"Releasing your compatriots," she clarifies. "We can't just let them out all at once, it'll be bedlam. But even if we do it one at a time, and give everyone personalized attention, we'll still need a strategy here."

So… personnel management. You don't know if she knew at your specialty or just shot a wild guess, but it's ballsy, for sure.

But it also does put you in a measure of control. And in a good position to boot, relative your crew and your fellow trolls, at the very least.

"Well, what we be trying to accomplish here, then?" you ask her, hiking Zaphir up and preparing to summon all your half-wits.

"To explain to the newcomers their situation with as little anxiety and confusion as possible," she begins. "To assuage their worries. To clarify their new position. To offer aid in a manner that will allow them to accept it without fear and without the expectation of payment. To arrange for personalized habitation, and the eventual integration into the rest of our society."

"Hm," you say, and then, "and what all does that be entailing? The position, the aid and the society."

"The position of refugees fleeing a violent and dangerously unstable dictatorial regimen," she says, with a little smile like she's been wanting to get it out of her chest. "The aid is in the physical, psychological and monetary sense, and will consist of a basic income, regular meals and wardrobes, counseling, as well as private living spaces, and the availability of courses and teaching materials in whichever specialty they choose, completely free of charge, regardless of previous occupation or educational level. The guarantee of equal rights, equal treatment and equal social expectations regardless of blood color, and a complete repudiation of the caste system and its arbitrary restrictions. The integration in a society in which you're allowed to come and go at will, to change jobs and occupations at your personal discretion, to bitch and complain about people in power including me, without a shred of fear for your life and livelihood. And the extension of all these arrangements to any and all future refugees, with no exceptions. There's more, but," she cocks her head to the side, a gesture surprisingly incongruous to her severe image, "that's the gist of it."

You pay attention as best as you can, repeat it to yourself in your head. It's… no wonder they're all so interested in Ol' Spice and his file folder, then. They're like if the Sufferer did win his rebellion, and then managed to keep the Empire from imploding somehow. Despite yourself, you're feeling kind of into this; it's been only a few hours, but they _have_ been plenty nice to you, when there was really nothing you could possibly do to force them to. And Zaphir was playing all happy-like even before you were there.

There's one problem, though.

"This is being all well and super good, my sis," you say, glancing back up from the floor, "but for all you be talking about living and habitationing, you ain't being clear on _where_. And if you gonna offer this sweet-seeming deal out to all my brothers out there in the empire, then you gotta be knowing there's a fuckton of us to be had."

"Oh, space is the least of our concerns," she says, all glib-like. "There's plenty of it out there. This planet is good to start with, nice and fertile— it was terraformed for a plantation, then ceded by the Betty Crocker Foundation— and lucky for us it suits all your atmospheric and gravitational requirements too! And with your garden sample, I daresay we can turn it into a home away from home for your people in good time."

" _One_ planet ain't gonna cut it in the long run, though," you insist. "Not if you'll really— not if you really think you can give us all them gifts, for free, food and blocks for everyone with faygo besides. My people have a hard time out there." You glare at her, hike Zaphir up a little firmer. "I ain't gonna help you break their pump-cookies."

She shakes her head through your little speech, her smile rueful and amused, eyes closed behind her round glasses.

" _Space_ is the least of our concerns," she repeats, emphatically. "But I may as well demonstrate. Look up there, Eudora, see that little moon? It's nameless yet."

You look up. There's a satellite almost directly overhead, white and tiny, surrounded by washed up stars; its light glistens at the edges of the roof's glass plates in straight silver lines.

The Lady swipes her hand and plucks it from the sky.

You don't know how you know it, but it's no sleight of hand. You _feel_ a change in the air, for a terrifying millisecond, like an analog hivestem winch-compartment plunging under your feet; the silver light is snuffed, the sky beyond the glass is gone black, and a cloud of stars like a galactic inkwash is crisscrossing a very pale set of rings.

At your elbow, you feel the air bend around a _weight_ , and it takes you a lot of blank oh-fucks and unreturned Pascal-pings before you gather the nerve to look down.

The woman is holding a little gray rock, no bigger than it looked like up there. It floats above her palm, rotating slowly.

You can see tiny, tiny craters.

"Here," she says, impishly, "hold it!"

"No!" you squeeze out, and then Zaphir's arm rises ponderous around your horns and over your shoulder and she cups her hand in expectation, eyes serious and inquisitive and bright fucking awake, of course she is. Your little girl.

Your hand hovers under hers, uselessly, as the crazy alien overlady drops a floating doompebble into Zaphir's palm. It floats still, like it's cushioned by invisible water, but even a ways away you can feel some sort of weight on your hand, a strange aura of heaviness.

You wonder if it's gravity.

A whole moon's gravity, but gone tiny and squeaky like tiny people's voices in comedy movies before they get stepped on.

"Cooooool," Zaphir whispers, with infinite more eloquence than you can muster, and then, to your relief, offers it back.

"Alright," the Lady says, scooping it up with both cupped hands. "That's enough of maintaining this planet's orbit and stuff."

She casually whips her hand back up and again, that winch-compartment feel; the air brightens, the light returns, the wide weighed aura is gone. Zaphir tucks her head back against your neck and goes back to pretending.

"Like I said, space is not an issue," she repeats, softly. "Population is not an issue. We can build entire solar systems from the ground up as required." And she smiles to you. "We don't bother with conquest for a great many reasons, and this is but _one_."

"Hm," you say, and then you think.

And you think.

"Start with the rusties," is your conclusion. "And the brownies. They get the rawest deal, and they won't miss it. People, yeah, but not their old lot— they'll be fucking glad of studying whatever, eating whatever, without worrying about culling. It'll be weird at first, some of them won't _get_ it, I don't think, won't be happy—"

She nods grimly—

"—not until they see it working for everyone else at least," you continue. "But give 'em their time, let ‘em make their blocks, make little lives. Then you bring out the yellows and olives. It'll be the same. Yellows get pushed into engineering when they don't get made into batteries, and their brains are ill-used both ways. Olives have a better time, but not by much. If the rustybrowns are thriving and happy, they'll fall in line with little drama— and unless a huge lot dies from age, they'll outnumber the newcomers, and if they like their new lot, they won't take with boat-stirring. They'll enforce for themselves."

"Hm," the lady nods again, staring into the distance. Seems to be committing things to memory.

"Then you let out the teals and so on, one color at a time," you finish. "I say that because we're on blueblood territory now, and they'll fight change. The teals maybe not so much, they're usually stuck with paper-pushing and putting things in places proper, they might appreciate not having to do that job, but the rest will be bad. The important part now is making sure everyone below is nice and good and strong before you bring out the next color, because the old group will _far_ outnumber the new, but the new will be _far_ more used to being slaved on, and they'll want back on top; and blues for instance tend to get brain-fiddling powers, as well as purples like me."

"Psychic blockers, then," she mumbles to herself.

"Good luck with that shit," you say, and then, "what?"

"Do you think you could help with testing those?" she asks. "When we finish a prototype, I mean."

"Uh, sure," you accede, "if it can be done, it'll be a mighty boon for the lowbloods for sure. It'll complicate my life a bit," you admit, "but they make do without on a worse hand."

"Remarkable," she says out of nowhere, with a little smile. "And you say this is only half of you. Here," she takes your elbow again, leading you, "while we wait on your _other_ half— shall we go back inside? To my office, I mean. Now that we have an outline, we need to hash out the details. And for all I spoke of explaining things properly to newcomers, we haven't done a good job of explaining things to _you._ " She grins. "This needs to be rectified."

You crack out a huge yawn, and not even on purpose.

"Hah! Or maybe tomorrow," she says, amused. "Go to sleep! You have a personal room assigned already— not the one you woke up in— but we can install an extra bed on Zaphir's if you'd rather. Welcome to the Coalition of the Free Systems! Gosh, this was a pretty awkward introduction. Maybe we can workshop a better tour once more of your people are out, something that really takes your experience into account. Think on it! Heh—"

She laughs suddenly, looking up at the clear sky; you're startled to notice, in her grinning visage, that she has big front teeth. Blunt and wide and prominent, not as ungainly as Musstang's, but charming and strangely… normal. Unroyal. Non-godly.

"God!" she sighs, still grinning happily with her big teeth. "I was so far beyond furious, but just a short conversation and all that weight is taken off my chest. I needn't have worried. You'll all do just fine, you'll be great!" She turns her radiant smile to you. "I can't wait— I can't wait to see you all crush that fucking bitch. It's going to be epic. Oh, by the way—" she doesn't give you any time to recover from that swerve— "when should we release the ex-battery trolls? Along with their color range? Because with all that neural remapping they'll be pretty delayed and that might set their group back…"

You whip your head around fast enough to whap Zaphir's horn with your ear. "Wait, what?"

And then:

"…huh."

Well, huh. Look at that, then.

#

Your name is Eudora Kalhil and you're living with aliens now, in an empty plantation planet with a single spaceport.

It's pretty great.

They make good on their word and get Pascal out soon, to your relief. Together, you sit down with the Scary Lady and a bunch of scientists and do a lot of boring talking about how to take care of everyone; it takes nights of gabbing, and you half wish these fuckers were bastards enough to just take it out your hands. Pascal rides your brain hardcore whenever you check out on the legalese, which is a lot. Thinking is tiring.

Olvier is fucking stoked about telling everyone about the Sufferer, now that culling is out of consideration and he's got curious aliens ahoy. He's staring less into space, but in exchange seems to have turned into a chatterbox. The science aliens say he'll pipe down eventually.

You love your crew and you miss your bridge hopbeasts, but out of a sense of obligation to setting your own example, you have them released bottom up, just like you first outlined. So you get to touch base with Frigna and Melita and everyone, and also Sharsa, who was from maintenance; they corroborate your estimations and are fucking invaluable in herding the next batch of rustybrowns from the next frigate, who are a malnourished mess of scars and disbelief, and whose seargeant you fully intend to fistfight in the backyard once olives are out.

Bless your cleaners and maintenance, because compared to you and to everyone who came out next, they were unflappable, put together and fucking on _point_.

A few ships in, and the aliens raise up a row of wide squatty buildings around the compound, hivestems in name but with a blueblood's floorplan for each unity; meals are served in huge beautiful halls, with dishes laid out for the taking and constantly refreshed.

The more well-adapted are starting to pick at career pamphlets with discerning eyes, or to sit with science aliens talking seriously about psychic stuff. Veterinary classes quickly grow in demand, but so does non-culling medicullery, somehow. Your old crew is especially keen, and you cheer them on.

By the time yellows are scheduled for release, these ex-shit-scrubbers have bloomed their own set of managerial geniuses, and they have things so well in hand you get to finally relax and focus on yourself. You've been on landscaping too— choosing samples from your garden for all the ongoing projects, whatever isn't poisonous and will take the weather— but even that you also get to drop; the Scary Lady is keen on gardening at whatever scale, and you're all too happy to let her and retreat to your own lawn, a long slope gentling down from the sliding glass doors of your habitational unity, just asking to be filled with green and color, to be dug into slowly while your mind settles other matters.

Zaphir keeps trying and failing to cartwheel on that wide open space, too. But that’s okay.

You have a booklet on pediatrics and a brand new future to harvest. 


End file.
